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Call for papers
EASA 26-30 Aug 2008
Panel: For a sceptical anthropology?
This panel’s provocative title seeks to engage with a recurrent
problem in anthropology. How do we know when an expressed statement or
belief is ‘just a metaphor’, and when we ought to ‘take it literally’.
While it seems self-evident that the answers to this kind of question
can only come from the ethnography, in some situations the
ethnographic data may itself be confusing and contradictory. How then
do we not only make sense of what might be going on, but also theorise
and work with it anthropologically? We could take a heuristic rather
than an analytic approach to our ethnography, allowing all definitions
to come from the field as it were (see Henare, Holbraad and Wastell,
2006, Introduction). However, people are not always consistent in the
ways in which they define and classify things. Furthermore, what
people do, what they say they do, and how they reflect on the
distinction between the two raises interesting questions. Multiple
epistemes may exist within the same person or group without them being
coterminous, i.e. their boundaries and meanings may clash at times and
not at others. This specific form of diversity forces us to re-examine
the implicit assumption of mutuality within the anthropological
project. This is not just a crisis of representation, it is a
challenge to the core principle of empathy and thus the possibility of
understanding through the ethnographic encounter.
We invite contributions to this panel that focus on these problems and
think through them ethnographically.
Please email your title and abstract of 200 - 300 words to Lee Wilson, [log in to unmask]
, or Soumhya Venkatesan, [log in to unmask]
_______
Dr. Lee Wilson
Centre for Research in the Arts,
Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Cambridge,
17 Mill Lane,
Cambridge, CB2 1RX
Tel: +44 1223 766886
Fax: +44 1223 765276
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/
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