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Short Abstract
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This panel will discuss practices of “transversive anthropologies” – i.e., those made in the discipline’s Southern and Eastern peripheries about research sites located abroad. It will bring together anthropologists based in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, who, unlike most of their conational colleagues, research and write about locations outside their nation-states, to examine the epistemological, political, and ethical issues involved in producing transversive anthropologies.
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Long Abstract
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The world system of anthropology rests upon a global division of intellectual labor in which scholars based in the Northern and Western hegemonic centers of the discipline typically travel the world to study alterity and produce theory, while most anthropologists elsewhere, in various Souths and Easts, do “ethnography at home” and write about nationally-defined locations. To help overcome this hierarchical geopolitics of knowledge, this panel will discuss practices of “transversive anthropologies” – i.e., those made from the discipline’s peripheries about sites located abroad. Taking seriously both the conceptual importance of ethnographic locations and the postcolonial studies’ argument that nationalism replicates colonial forms of power, we advocate that “world anthropologies” should challenge their national missions, engage in serious overseas research, and actually embrace the world. The panel aims to bring together anthropologists based in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, who, unlike most of their conational colleagues, research and write about locations outside their nation-states. The panel will discuss the epistemological, political, and ethical issues involved in transversive anthropologies and address questions such as: What are the similarities and differences between the practice of transversive anthropologies and of those made by colleagues to the North and to the West about the same areas and topics? What relationships do transversive anthropologies hold with the states in which they are made? What are the material limitations to the practice of transversive anthropologies? Who do transversive anthropologists write for, and in what languages? Who actually reads and debates with them? How do transversive anthropologies relate to global political-economic processes and contexts like colonialism, postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization? What unique contributions can transversive anthropologies make to the discipline? What challenges do they raise to global academic dependency and to academic and non-academic nationalisms?
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