World Anthropologies

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

A partire da una analisi su due recenti traduzioni dell’opera di Ernesto de Martino, apparse rispettivamente a Chicago (Sud e magia/Magic. A theory from the South) e a Parigi (La fine del mondo/ La fin du monde), l’Autore affronta una stranezza antropologica: l’apparente assenza degli antropologi italiani dal campo scientifico mondiale contemporaneo. Sono svolte riflessioni comparative sulle due ricezioni che danno luogo a una più ampia analisi sul lascito demartiniano fuori d’Italia, con esclusivo riferimento agli USA e alla Francia. Da un lato, il caso anglosassone sembra inerente a un avvicinamento la cui gradualità indica l’incertezza dei tentativi di dialogo; dall’altro lato, il caso francese allude a un processo di sovrapposizione tra due differenti campi antropologici nazionali, basato su un più profondo stile face-à-face del confronto scientifico interno all’antropologia europea. In un anthroscape globale caratterizzato dal dibattito sulle reciproche esclusioni tra diverse world anthropologies, l’Autore esamina il rapporto tra il dominio attuale del discorso anglosassone e la pratica del dialogo franco-italiano, riflettendo sul lascito internazionale di de Martino nel mondo contemporaneo.

On 21 May 2013, I was bestowed the Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque in Tel Aviv's Cinematheque. “Heart at East” is a coalition of 20 NGOs dedicated to promote community consciousness as it exposes and defies Israel’s folkloric marginalization of Mizrahi cultures. Formed in 2009, Heart at East was meant to remedy the extreme inequality in the allocation of public funds and other resources distributed by the Israeli regime to cultural institutions. The Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque was established by these Mizrahi NGOs as an alternative to the Israel Prize, the state’s most prestigious lifetime achievement award. The Israel Prize recognizes contributions to the categories of humanities, natural sciences, culture and arts, and national contributions. Its award ceremony is on Israel’s independence day. Most recipients of this award, however, have been Ashkenazi. The Heart at East Lifetime Achievement Plaque aims to remedy this bias by recognizing the lifetime achievements of Mizrahi community authors, artists, musicians, scientists, and grassroots leaders coming from Israel’s majority citizenry. Below is a link to the Hebrew-to-English translation of the powerpoint presented by the Heart at East MC at the ceremony:

In recent years, several works have been published on the history of anthropology in specific national contexts (e.g., Stocking 1974, 1995; Kuklick 1991; Barth et al. 2005; Ranzmaier 2011) but little on the history of anthropology in Portugal—and the exceptions have largely been written from and for the Portuguese community (e.g., Areia and Rocha 1985; Branco 1986; Pereira 1986, 1998; Pina-Cabral 1991; Leal 2000, 2006; Roque 2001; Santos 2005; Sobral 2007; Matos 2013). Even then, with the exception of some authors such as Guimarães (1995), Pereira(1998),Roque(2001),Santos(2005),andmyownwork(Matos 2013), it has been uncommon for Portuguese anthropologists and historians to recognize the existence of a distinct school of anthropology connected to the city of Porto, originating with the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (spae, Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia) and its legacy. This chapter intends, therefore , to contribute to a more inclusive international history of anthropology , as suggested by Richard Handler (2000), who reminded us of the need to interpret past anthropological practices in relation to specific historical and cultural moments.

This research explores the relationship between knowledge production and place by studying different notions of disciplinary and personal peripherality. In an auto-ethnographic manner, the author discusses some of the power relations at work and the politics of representation of an anthropology being done at the margins of European scholarship. By analysing his own professional trajectory, the author surmises that the question of centre or periphery highly depends on the perspective applied (i.e., methods, labour conditions, institutional support, funding, the scale, access to jobs…) Also, he argues that there is a distinct form of reflexivity at the margins, as well as a distinct temporal regime-characterised by discontinuity. To contrast and complement his personal insights, the author invited fifteen scholars working in Estonia to share their experience of researching "at the margins". Based on their responses, the author concludes by admitting that being at the periphery is relevant, yet circumstantial-something to be aware of, yet not definitive or a determinant. The article contributes to the discussion on the need to differentiate, contextualise and problematise the question of the academic marginality, making this issue more nuanced by putting the ethnographic focus on the conditions of possibility among practitioners and the state of being peripheral.

Overview With the double purpose of updating a scattered database and achieving an accurate profile of its constituency, in 2015 the Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia (Por-tuguese Anthropological Association) launched an online questionnaire to be filled in by people who identified themselves as anthropologists. Nearly 1,000 people responded, both nationals and expatriates—not an insignificant number for a small country with a relatively recent professionalization of social scientists. An analysis of the data that were gathered gave a clearer view of who the respondents were, where they worked, how much of their current activity was related to their training in anthropology, how many of them held academic positions, whether stable or temporary, to what extent they circulated between jobs, countries, government work, nonprofit, community engagement, international agencies, self-employment, unemployment, what their scientific interests were and their social engagements, as well as other relevant matters. Anthropology was already known to be a vibrant community that had grown mostly since the mid-1980s. This entry will address how it emerged and expanded, its roots and ancestors, and how it relates to other national and international intellectual traditions. Also addressed will be its relations to other disciplines, its main institutions of research and teaching (past and present), and the political contexts in which they developed, and the discipline's current fragilities and strengths. The underlying theses are the following: 1. Anthropology as a social science could not really flourish in Portugal until the 1970s and 1980s. The discipline has existed since the late nineteenth century, following different institutional paths: while physical anthropology had an uninterrupted history as a specialty within the natural sciences, the branches of anthropology that address culture, language, and society had a more complex and interrupted existence. In spite of the fact that there were remarkable ethnologists, philologists, and folklorists—plus colonial ethnographic surveys conducted by administrators with anthropological training—during a large portion of the twentieth century, the right political conditions did not exist for the exercise of critical social analysis and most approaches to ethnographic and anthropological subjects did not develop a sustained theoretical component. 2. The intellectual freedom following the demise of the 1933–74 dictatorship provided an appropriate environment for the launching of a local-based field of critical social sciences. The field benefited from the return of scholars who had been trained The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

Estudiar las formas como las diferentes tradiciones intelectuales han
entendido las epistemologías y pedagogías antropológicas, así como las
teorías de la práctica, nos permite avanzar la propuesta de las antropologías
mundiales de decolonizar la disciplina. Decolonizar la disciplina implica
reconocer no solo la multiplicidad de conocimientos, sino también las
múltiples formas en las que la antropología puede contribuir a la eliminación
del colonialismo y su responsabilidad de hacerlo. La práctica
antropológica en América Latina ha estado permeada por la política y
el activismo; como resultado, los antropólogos en América Latina han
cuestionado constantemente su papel y el nivel de compromiso con la
realidad que estudian. En este artículo discuto el desarrollo de la antropología brasileña en el marco de las antropologías mundiales, utilizando como ilustración el caso del trabajo antropológico con comunidades quilombolas. Enfatizo la necesidad de reflexionar sobre la complejidad de los procesos que confrontan las antropologías mundiales, las distinciones artificiales entre la antropología académica «pura» y la antropología aplicada, así como el compromiso político profundo que ha caracterizado a la disciplina en la práctica.

In this paper a key dialectical link between space, body, and
ethnography is proposed, mainly within the context of Latin American
anthropology. I emphasize the Argentine case through the analysis of my
own field experience among the Qom or Toba people of the Chaco region.
The idea suggested here is that the constitution of anthropological “places” is
related with a political economy of academia which is influenced in turn by
the geopolitical location of each anthropological tradition. The interplay
between space, body, and ethnography shapes not only the conceptual bodies
of anthropology but also the ethnographers’ own regime of materiality. The
latter displace and open themselves to the world according to the contingencies
of both their academic and field backgrounds.

My farewell to Anthropology Southern Africa, which I edited between 2011 and 2015 describes the exciting recent history of the journal from its previous incarnation to ASnA's relaunch as a southern African based periodical with international reach.

This commentary revisits the "Rethinking Euro-anthropology" Forums published in the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. It reconsiders three specific issues: who are the subjects of European anthropology, who are its others, and who are its authors? Noting that European anthropology does not imply a spatial fixity (there is no "there there" in European anthropology), we suggest instead that European anthropological scholarship is the outcome of diverse forms of crossborder and transborder exchanges. Yet as a project that is both intellectual and political, we further discuss some of the contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes behind this "worlding" of the discipline. By observing that E(e)uropean anthropology in particular should constantly strive to relate the locating endeavours of ethical practice, empirical evidence, historical reflection and humanistic theorising, we call for innovative forms of academic collaboration, narrative creations and belonging to/with places. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Patrick Laviolette, Sarah Green, Francisco Martínez Locating European anthropology

This special section explores and problematises the disciplinary boundaries of European anthropology by studying the shifting conditions of our work and changing centres of gravity in the field. The contributors have been invited to think about what the concept of “European anthropology” brings actually to the fore, while working in a context of changing epistemic relations, labour conditions, institutional assessment and claims to disciplinary validity. This set of papers and commentaries proposes to approach European anthropology as a specific kind of relation between localities and practitioners, not an essence. Polemically, we argue that European anthropology does not exist as a single, easy to define entity precisely because it exceeds its conditions of possibility and goes beyond geographic relations and separations. Additionally, we pose as problematic not only the conjunction of the adjective European and the noun anthropology, but also the separate standing of each of them and what kinds of relations are established as a result (possession, placing, aspiration, rejection and so on). We conclude that a key feature characterising European anthropology is its transnational character – multiplying the relations with what has been traditionally considered nonanthropological and non-European, and troubling of the boundaries of the discipline.

This commentary revisits the “Rethinking Euro-anthropology” Forums published in the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. It reconsiders three specific issues: who are the subjects of European anthropology, who are its others, and who are its authors? Noting that European anthropology does not imply a spatial fixity (there is no “there there” in European anthropology), we suggest instead that European anthropological scholarship is the outcome of diverse forms of crossborder and transborder exchanges. Yet as a project that is both intellectual and political, we further discuss some of the contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes behind this “worlding” of the discipline. By observing that E(e)uropean anthropology in particular should constantly strive to relate the locating endeavours of ethical practice, empirical evidence, historical reflection and humanistic theorising, we call for innovative forms of academic collaboration, narrative creations and belonging to/with ...

This paper reviews the current state of anthropological
theory and practice in Argentina, and what are Argentine anthropology’s
relationships to current issues of contemporary social thought.  In this regard, the
three topics that guide my itinerary in this essay—displacement, space, and
subject—provide a theoretical bridge connecting the issues addressed in
the different sections. These topics are part of the heritage of the dynamic
early Latin American critical social sciences that emerged during the sixties;
they are also connected to the impact that developments in postructuralism,
postcolonial critique, and postmodernism had on the intellectual task
of our generation.