This panel raises the fundamental issues on the the better ways of living and futures, triggered by the experience of impermanence - war and disaster - and crisis - illness, disease, deportation, and misfortunes.
In the face of this, will we just rely on Sherry Ortner’s (2016) dark anthropology comprising a theoretical emphasis on terms of power, exploitation, and chronic pervasive inequality that impinges even the most intimate aspects of our lives.
Notwithstanding the relevance of such anthropological inquiry, however, Ortner questions its purpose “if we cannot imagine better ways of living and better futures” (p. 60).
Along the line of this imaginative future, Joel Robbins (2013: 458) offers an alternative frame which he calls “good anthropology” which does not dismiss people’s investments in realizing the good in time as a mere utopianism and returns to “our discipline’s ability to challenge our own versions of the real”.
Revised as moral imagination, moreover, Bielo (2018) sees this as the key for collaboration between anthropology - alongside other disciplines like philosophy, literature, feminist and queer studies, psychology, arts - and theology. For instance, anthropology of religion’s empirical insight can bolster theology’s prophetic voices whose ambition is to abolish injustice against people in the margins, wage peace, and dismantle oppressive and prejudicial orders.
Theoretically, this means panel contributions will deal with:
? conjoining insights on “eventing process” with theories about more local, cultural worlds;
? returning to the strengths of field conversation, observation, and reflexive self-critique, discerning of ethical obligations and practice;
? directing attention more intensely on what matters to the communities we study (and work), what matters to them through the day, and thus what makes the emergent material and social worlds in which we are immersed.
