Category: Essays
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The Anthropology of Post-Coalonialism
The convenors are pleased to present this review-essay alongside an extended reading list of literature on coalmining communities. Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes Durham University July 15, 2022 British social anthropologists have long suffered from “an uncertainty concerning the legitimacy (even the possibility) of undertaking anthropology in Britain” (Rapport 2002, 4). Despite such concerns, anthropologists have spent…
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Waste Fantasies: Challenging Prevailing Notions of Waste, or How to Reclaim Political Land
Kathrin Eitel Institute for Cultural Anthropology & European EthnologyGoethe-University Frankfurt a/M, Germany July 15, 2021 Waste is very much persistent and omnipresent in our contemporary world. It’s depicted in pictures on social media campaigns, it is part of our daily lives, it lays around, it permeates and is eventually removed or liquefies and decays into…
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Theoretical Dancing, Liquidity and Positioning
Elena Burgos Martinez International Institute of Asian Studies Leiden University Institute for Area Studies May 2020 In the COVID-19 hiatus, the ecoracism of environmental healing‘s rhetoric reminds us that we are not there yet. Nature is, above all, conceptually ill. Since its inception as a mode of inquiry and research subject, Nature has been travelling…
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Nothingness as Ethnographic Theory
Martin Demant Frederiksen School of Culture and Society Aarhus University April 2020 It is difficult not to start a piece about nothingness on a philosophical note. And so, I will. The question of “why is there something instead of nothing” is one that, according to Heidegger, has not been posed properly since antiquity. The reason…
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Back to Liberation Anthropology
Émir Mahieddin Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux (CéSor) École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris February 2020 The decade that has just ended has been marked by profound political upheavals as well as by a renewed interest in ethnographic theory in anthropology. Does this represent a mere temporal coincidence or is there…
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The Lives of Signs and Signs of Lives
Shaila Seshia Galvin Department of Anthropology and Sociology Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva November 2019 School mornings, in my home at least, rarely afford hospitable moments for thinking about ethnographic theory. But a few weeks ago, walking with my children to school, I noticed the appearance overnight of cardboard signs tied with…
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Ethnographic theory in catastrophic times
Theodoros Kyriakides Department of Social and Political Sciences University of Cyprus Tkyria07@ucy.ac.cy October 2019 I vividly remember one seminar during my time as a PhD student at the University of Manchester Department of Social Anthropology, when a prominent visiting scholar was asked by a then postgraduate student her opinion regarding the ongoing climate crisis humanity…
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Ethnographic theory: A product of observation, reflection … and travel
Noel B. Salazar Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) Katholieke Universiteit Leuven September 2019 To answer the question what ethnographic theory is and to understand how it comes about, we first need to agree on the meaning of the constituent parts, namely ‘ethnography’ and ‘theory’. Within the discipline of anthropology, the former concept is used in multiple…
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Can ethnographic theory incorporate history? by Susana de Matos Viegas
Susana de Matos Viegas Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon February 2019 The renewal of Malinowski’s empiricism in the 1990s can be considered as a first and critical step in the emergence of new ways of performing anthropology through what has been called ethnographic theory. In his monograph on democracy in Ilhéus (a city…
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What is Ethnographic Theory?
João de Pina-Cabral School of Anthropology and Conservation University of Kent October 2018 When I was asked to help determine the meaning of the expression Ethnographic Theory (ET), I thought of the words of Samuel ibn Naghrillah, a reputed Talmudic scholar and vizir of Granada in the tenth century. He wrote in a poem that…