Call for Guest Entries!

Dear anthropologists, we at the NET are happy to receive your suggestions for guest blogs or guest readings lists related, in the widest sense, to the creation of theory from ethnography! Get in touch!

Call for Papers for the NET panel at the EASA 2020 conference

Conflicting temporalities in the anthropology of the future

Social processes take place across varied temporal frameworks, timings and paces. Future orientated action is often challenged by human and non-human actors who follow competing temporal logics. This panel explores the confrontation of different futures under conditions of constraint and coercion.

New reading list: “Understanding Kashmir” by Radhika Gupta

Critical Kashmir scholars offer a capacious ethnographic “field” and archive that speaks to the silences and fabrications of scholarship tinted and tainted by majoritarian ideologies. Taking this to be ethnographic theory is the practice of decolonizing anthropology.

News from the NET

/Call for NET-sponsored panels at the EASA Conference in 2020

The next EASA conference is coming up in Lisbon in July 2020! The Call for Panels is now open, with a great variety of options beyond the classic format. Are you thinking of submitting a panel? Do you think it would fit the interest of the NET? We are happy to sponsor a selected number of panels. Please note that this year, the regulation changed and networks cannot be guaranteed an accepted panel. If you would like to increase your outreach, we warmly invite you to send us your panel proposal before October 10 (leaving us the time to make a selection and you submit to the EASA by October 21).

/Report on the NET Panel at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 29-30 August 2019

A quick note to thank everyone for participating in our EASA sponsored panel “Anthropologies, Futures and Prediction” at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society 29-30 August 2019, in Helsinki. We were delighted to have fantastic papers and visual media on futurist aesthetics in Bolivia (Karl Swinehart), forced departures and uncertainty of asylum seekers in Germany (Sonja Moghaddari), the future imaginaries of asbestos victims and activists in Italy (Agata Mazzeo), to forms of abstraction surrounding extrajudicial killings in the Philippines (Scott MacLochlainn), and neo-rural futures in France (Ieva Snikersproge). And to top it off, we had the wonderful Felix Ringel as a discussant! We particularly liked exploring theoretical issues through ethnographic video and photos in our second session. Many thanks again to everyone!

NET Digest no 10

/Articles

Pushing past the other to the otherwise, a great collection of short pieces in Cultural Anthropology by Laura McTighe and Megan Raschig.

The introduction to a special issue on “The ethical constitution of energy dilemmas” by Mette M. High and Jessica M. Smith in JRAI.

From our recent guest reading list author, Patrick McKearney, in Ethnos on judgement, critique, and surprise as engines of anthropological theory. And read his reading list on “Care” here!

Adam Scott Clark with a remarkably timely piece on the definition of “Chinese” in Hong Kong.

And we couldn’t not have something about the moon landing this summer!

Although not recent but still timely: Navaro-Yashin’s argument for a trans-paradigmatic ethnography.

A Tsantsa Special issue on decolonial processes in Swiss academia.

/Monographs

In case you missed this publication, this is what An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular can look like.

Cutting through a thick discourse with an ethnographic knife is Jean Jackson’s superb Managing Multiculturalism Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia.

Nicolas Argenti’s lovely book on absence in Greece, with Remembering Absence: The Sense of Life in Island Greece.

/Blogs

A blog collection on Muslim Humanitarianism curated by Till Mostowlansky.

Girish Daswani’s blog on the “continuing presence of an elite, masculine, and imperial habitus within the discipline, which has been […] internalized by all of us, even non-white anthropologists” and the need to decolonialize anthropology.

/Media

On the return of scientific racism.

And for those cinematically Korean inclined, the Korean Film Archive is uploading many classic Korean films to youtube!

NET Digest no 9

Here we are again with our monthly digest of readings that inspired us! For those of you who didn’t yet do so, check out also our recent guest reading list on “The Ethics of Care” by Patrick McKearney! Have a great summer, everyone!

/Articles

In line with the interest of this year’s NET panel at the FAS conference, Bob Frame’s Typology of Antarctic Futures.

Check out the new ejournal Roadsites, on the social life of infrastructure and a first issue on temporalities.

Another recent ethnography-centered journal – in French mostly but partly also in English – is the Revue Terrain. Note in particular the recent collective issue on Apocalypses curated by Matthew Carey. They also have an interesting blog.

/Monographs

Rob Borofsky’s critical contribution, An Anthropology of Anthropology: Is It Time to Shift Paradigms?, is available for download here.

Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None about “the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology”.

/Blogs

We want to be part of the places where you can find the change that Zoe Todd invokes when arguing why we need to go beyond elite anthropology.

Ashanté Reese incites us think of ethnographic refusal as care, which may call into question imperatives of academic knowing.

Mariam Durrani on how to “remap the traditional distinctions between university and community through rigorous scholarship and a commitment to social justice”.

Allegra Lab’s thematic thread on statelessness, displacement and disappearance.

Reading list on indigenous research methods by Helen Kara.

NET Digest no 8

Dear all, June is here and here is also this month’s digest with some work we find inspiring.

Inspiring is also what we would like this website to be like, and if you feel you would like to contribute to this with a guest blog or a guest reading list (maybe you have some time to write this summer?), you are more than welcome. Just get in touch with us!

/Articles

William Mazzarella’s new Annual Review piece on populism

A fantastic new special edition of Radical History Review on boycotting

A JRAI special issue on anthropology and surealism

/Monographs & books

Nina Trige Andersen’s new book, Labor Pioneers, on Filipino labor in Denmark

Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight’s The Anthropology of the Future

/Blog

Thinking Spain and the archives of empire

On the politics of photojournalism

On Turkish immigration to Germany

Obituary of Binyavanga Wainaina

On Queer Futures in anthropological research by Tom Boellstorff and Cymene Howe.

/Media

A 5 minute deconstruction of Charlie Chaplin’s use of food in his movies, bringing together themes of memory, poverty and the residue of trauma, the psychology of comedy.

Jian Liu’s photos of Tiananmen 1989

Trying to define the cultures of generations

Allegra Lab’s podcast roundup

NET Digest no 5

Dear NET members,

Here is this month’s digest with readings that we hope catch your interest!

This time, we have more news! For this year’s NET event, we will be convening a (partly unconventional) panel on the topic of “Anthropologies, Futures and Prediction” at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society (in Helsinki, Finland on August 29-30, 2019)! We hope that this will be the occasion to meet some of you in person! Please check out the CfP at the bottom of the digest. Click here for more information on the conference.

/Articles

The first issue of the new journal Public Anthropologist is out featuring a collection of articles on silencing and structures of power within academia.

A fascinating article on data centers in Iceland, and the unsettled and in-betweens of tech infrastructures, by Alix Johnson

From inbetweeness to improvisation in an article by Nur Amali Ibrahim in Anthropological Quarterly last summer.

Cigarettes and marketing in Indonesia, by Marina Welker in the current issue of JRAI.

/Monographs & books

Nomi Stone’s ethnographically inspired poetry on fictive Middle Eastern villages in US Military trainings.

In her monograph published last year, Radhika Govindrajan writes about how human and animal worlds interweave.

/Blogs

Caroline Gatt and Joss Allen imagine an educational institution that embraces an onto/epistemology of correspondence: https://issuu.com/deveronarts/docs/correspondence_version_5 or https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1654-sketches-for-regenerative-scholarship?fbclid=IwAR1r8N2k8PZWHBoJX0TaOWHJV3yId6dZDbljXCY3hPuBGqhxgrHU39qyuKw (text based).

Eric Plemons’ reflections about Trump administration’s ban of transgender people from the US military.

Allegra’s Hypertext Thematic week which offers insights into the exiting world of digital ethnographies curated by Andrea Pia. Curious about playing a digital ethnography? Try out playing Peng.

Somatosphere’s “Diability from the South” Series arranged by Michele Friedner and Tyler Zoanni.

Malini Sur writes about shape-shifting and fieldwork related trauma cures across national medical systems.

How to decanonize anthropology with teaching its history from the margins? Check out this syllabus.

/CFP

“Anthropologies, Futures and Prediction”

“The future is not what it once was. Technological, political, and infrastructural changes have all effected new ways, not only of imagining, but of predicting and realizing the future(s). This workshop seeks to locate itself at the intersection of the multiple ways in which the future is known and imagined, taking into account the dialectics between the researcher and the field. What exactly is the future? Do we distinguish, like Derrida, between a “predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable” future, and l’avenir—the unexpected and unanticipated? How do the temporalities of our fieldwork and our professional experience of uncertainty inform the way we produce knowledge about conceptions of future and prediction? And what of the contexts and extra-contexts in which the ethnographic emerges? Ranging from the online aggregation of predictive data to financial instruments and algorithms, state projects of governance based on prediction, to dreaming, death, and afterlives, to urban infrastructural planning, this panel, sponsored by EASA’s Network of Ethnographic Theory, asks how the future is part and parcel of what constitutes the social in all its utopic and dystopic forms. As part of EASA’s Network of Ethnographic Theory’s sponsorship, papers of this panel will be submitted as a special issue to Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale.

In addition to the usual panel format, as described above, we will have an additional session in which panelists are invited to engage the thematic of their own and their own ethnographic and theoretical interventions through alternative media forms, and amidst a more broader and inclusive discussion of “Anthropologies, Futures and Predictions.” Thus, we are interested in having panelists present papers in the first panel, and have opportunities to show ethnographic film, audio, installation forms, and so forth, in the second. 

If you are interested in participating, please contact us. Abstracts for papers will be due March 31^st. There will be some funding available for EASA members!

NET Digest no 4

The NET wishes a happy 2019 to everybody! We need hope and our best imagination in the face of continuous inequality, violence, exclusion… and increasing political irresponsibility.

/Articles

The sadly late Roy Wagner’s piece about the “self‐transformative and tactical character of the reciprocity of perspectives and its effects on language”.

Participation and the way anthropologist can confront the “challenges presently being posed by embodied cognition” is the subject João de Pina-Cabral recent article.

Bruce Kapferer reflects on how anthropology (as a generator of theory) risks alienation in the face of “the growth of economic pragmatism coupled with the current apotheosis of science and technology”.

The most recent recent issue of ANUAC features a thematic section about “The Malinowskian legacy in ethnography” curated by Elisabeth Tauber and Dorothy Zinn with contributions on continuities and discontinuities of Malinowski’s heritage around questions of race, infrastructure, historical anthropology…

Another return/redux of the culture concept by Martin Palecek

/Books

Zarin Ahmad’s Delhi’s Meatscapes theorizing and describing the politicization of meat butchers in Dehli

Daromir Rudnyckyj’s Beyond Debt on Islamic Finance

Four field shout-out, new archaeology book, Foraging in the Past edited by Ashley Lemke

Casey Golomski’s Funeral Culture on living and dying in Swaziland

/Blogs and Public Media

Laura Yakas on her ethnography of timelessness, madness and the workings of what she calls, citing Johanna Hedva (2016) the “current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy”

Speculative Anthropologies are fascinating us not least since we published Sabine Mohamed’s reading list. If you want to imagine how to “resist despair and to craft tangible ways of shaping and repairing the worlds we still hope for”, check out this blog collection curated by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley.

Elizabeth Hanna Rubio and Xitlalli Alvarez Almendariz invite us to reflect on political engagement in ethnographic knowledge production around a question of vocabulary: undocumented or illegalized?

Kristóf Szombati gives insights into the recent protests against the so called “Slave law” in Hungary and how they connect to other contemporary anti-neoliberal movements.

A fascinating digital interactive by Stanford University Press on Filming Revolution by Alisa Lebow

Two popular pieces on rethinking the Frankfurt School at the Boston Review and at Vox

Useful New York Op-ed by Pankaj Mishra, on Brexit, the partitioning of India and Pakistan, and important for thinking not only politics of the moment, but the  bureaucracies

For our French-speakers, here is a Q&A with Philippe Descola on the political, social environmental challenges of our times and his life’s work.

On mental health in academia at Editage

And let us not forget this month’s NET Guest Post by Smita Lahiri on “On Nonrecognition and Feminist Epistemology: Doing Ethnographic Theory with Mary Steedly”

NET digest vol. 2

We hope you survived Halloween. If so, might want to get to know some monsters at https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1584-time-of-monsters?fbclid=IwAR2jR7jnm158YsBXlTIRv0YB5PZ5LXybEvDqJtJ2uVE4K-krBw7SWVPEtQ4

Otherwise, here you go with this month’s inspirational readings!

/ Monographs and Articles:

Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability, Annual Review of Anthropology, Oct 2018:  https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041644?fbclid=IwAR25KW_EwVR_zpiDlde7YrTvv954Rq3DQ5n82RHX929f_m639k6hWTOqlAc&journalCode=anthro#article-denial

Stuart McLean’s fantastic book, imagining an anthropology that assumes a different genealogy, one merging more closely with the humanities: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/fictionalizing-anthropology

And his equally fantastic and boundary pushing edited volume from last year with Anand Pandian on the nature and continous experiment that is ehnographic writing: https://www.dukeupress.edu/crumpled-paper-boat

Margaret Lock, weaving between the anthropocenic, genomic, and forms of embodiemt: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9655.12855

Tobia Kelly on human rights, and the concept, construct, and political space of “conscience”: https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article/30/3/367/135395/A-Divided-ConscienceThe-Lost-Convictions-of-Human

Susannah Chapman on Gambian farmers, seeds, and intellectual property law: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.12703

Lindsey Freeman, and a memoir that weaves through social theory: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/reviews/single/978-1-5036-0689-0?fbclid=IwAR18Zqv01mygAR7O4UPCfZMgWiXOrPTWcqHZFcbNFg92tB8Z2sW3V-r8uzY%20Or%20https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lindsey-freeman/this-atom-bomb-in-me/?fbclid=IwAR0O9dyhwsysAjjUAN5-KWHqQ2nq4R5bufiYmW05jXPUxSjEyvcBK9rVatU

/ Blog posts

Fantastic piece on AI systems: https://anatomyof.ai/

For Halloween, George Nicholas on dressing up and cultural appropriation: https://www.sapiens.org/culture/cultural-appropriation-halloween/

Adam Kuper on kinship (problematic perhaps, but surely good to get a waning conversation going!): http://aotcpress.com/articles/talk-kinship/?fbclid=IwAR196Fr1wcGQccLXCD1M9scD0O3EtjKQGiIOLQIElMDtFzWc51s_rOtMfU4

Jon Bialecki’s new blog, touring mythologiques: https://touringmythologiques.wordpress.com/

Not new, but never got enough attention. Tristan Partridge on diagrams in anthropology: https://anthropologyoffthegrid.wordpress.com/ethnograms/diagrams-in-anthropology/

Book list on European migration regime: http://allegralaboratory.net/call-for-reviews-new-books-on-the-european-migration-regime/

And to go with Magaret Lock’s piece: How Henrietta Schmerler Was Lost, Then Found: https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Henrietta-Schmerler-Was/244782?key=40t1HyvNc9fWSmBHhIazDjvNtqx_uRr_mDCwWZkhD6ywH29CQ9z33d3SZayqJQ_FRnE2NVZ2enlqZG9oRk1wTTNPM3pzWWxNRHo3bGVtWWFpSWhGaDRBbEN1aw&fbclid=IwAR1Rh3x6IStv8TQnkjFJ5oxDt6jmANkrr-IZ3xG4uphHphZo2uLZKqI2Nd0

‘There is no DNA test to prove you’re Native American’: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129554-400-there-is-no-dna-test-to-prove-youre-native-american/?fbclid=IwAR1myFZSXwMv-7_SKO16U10kL2vlTWJdn-UhaN_kUt5gpyfdIc8nPxMD_AY

/ Job offers and CFP

European Association for Southeast Asian Studies call for panels and papers etc. (December 1, 2018 deadline) https://www.euroseas.org/content/euroseas-conference-2019-humboldt-universit%C3%A4t-zu-berlin

Announcing the Eleventh Annual SCA Student-Faculty Workshops at #AmAnth2018: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1544-announcing-the-eleventh-annual-sca-student-faculty-workshops-at-amanth2018

Interesting PhD scholarship on the visible and invisible within a material culture context: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/studentships/invisible-visible

Associate Professorship at Aarhus, open in focus/area: http://international.au.dk/about/profile/vacant-positions/academic-positions/stillinger/Vacancy/show/1008581/5283/

Lectureship at St. Andrew’s, open in area/focus: https://www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/ViewVacancyV2.aspx?enc=mEgrBL4XQK0+ld8aNkwYmBcu6R739kB3S4pZqAQDSf8snMxoPwT9Yh0G2SGeJ3+RmwIbNKjGtbIZWb7HA88qnABTwpsI9i/YZbUtCOqchPOIHi6WRXlzUNDbxdgxEaIsbNMWMXwTZ2mw9VWWWXN3UQ==

/ Public media

The audio of the Huxley Memorial Lecture Margaret Lock’s new article in JRAI is based on: https://soundcloud.com/royalanthropologicalinst/2016-huxley-memorial-lecture-by-margaret-lock

Podcast with Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick on his latest book, What Slaveholders Think: How Contemporary Perpetrators Rationalize what They Do (2017): https://newbooksnetwork.com/austin-choi-fitzpatrick-what-slaveholders-think-how-contemporary-perpetrators-rationalize-what-they-do-columbia-up-2017/?fbclid=IwAR2kTidotcXS7fkaDqXKqNzkQJtb6yMdRExEgiLU4pr8TEpv9pmplUmPzxE

Art as ethnography on This Anthro Life podcast: https://anchor.fm/this-anthro-life/episodes/Art-is-a-Movement-e2c78q

New Critical Inquiry podcast on philosophizing new forms of digital knowledge: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wb202-the-critical-inquiry-podcast/id1438552859?fbclid=IwAR3NfVheWvPs8_Jr9wYCmFKISozM-pTWPsw0sJWMcJQ_YHrTShufwxNHfOs

New York Times Magazine on Bruno Latour and the production of knowledge: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html?fbclid=IwAR0ZHnvs79gyaK_cpIb0WPNJN8uSyHTuUOhwuEAsC-R5scStpI0hPurkuGE