Blowing up the “World” of Anthropologies: Speaking from Experience
By World Anthropologies Editors and Contributing Editors
How are global academic power relations reflected in the everyday experiences of anthropologists around the world? How do we experience the privileging of academic production from Euro-American centers over nonhegemonic locations of anthropological thinking? How are these inequalities reflected in issues related to language, where a similar privileging of specific European languages exists? And, finally, how can we begin to overcome these inequalities, to work towards the worlding of anthropology?
Some of these issues have affected many of our colleagues in the discipline, particularly those based in the “Global South” and those who had to move countries either for their studies or careers. This call is an opportunity to share some of these personal experiences and to grapple with them. In this spirit, at the World Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist, we invite potential contributors to share:
Narratives, stories and experiences related to global academic power relations. We support the need for complaint, for the possibility of such complaints to be heard, and to their collectivizing as a tool of institutional change. We see the act of complaining as an affirmative mode of tearing down the house of anthropology and suggesting what to build in its place. (Papailias and Gupta 2021)
The deadline for the Call for Complaint was January 31, 2022.
We had invited contributors from around to world to send us brief texts or multimodal works addressing topics such as:
● Gatekeeping (journals, grants, recruitment)
● Publishing as a non-native English speaker
● Citational politics (canons, neo-Orientalism, guidelines)
● Languages (hierarchies, translations, heteroglossia)
● Academic (im)mobilities (funding, visas/passports, fieldwork, nativist hiring)
● Academic labor, “native anthropologists”, “key informants”
● Experiencing Euro-American centrism(s) elsewhere
● Moving to Euro-America for studies or work
● Negotiating one’s identity and "foreignness”
● Precarity across the world (neoliberal university, adjuncts, devaluing/defunding of humanities/social sciences, censorship, rising fascism)
● Microaggressions, experiences of racism and sexism related to place of origin, religious identity, colorism, cultural practices
● Burning down/blowing up anthropologies
● Experiences, prospects and limits for solidarity (networks, unions, publishing ventures) among anthropologists and across anthropologies
● Possibilities for affirming the plurality of anthropological knowledge production
We are currently reviewing the powerful submissions we received and plan to publish them in a thematic series during the following months. Stay tuned!