Practice and process have been key notions in many anthropological debates since the 1980s, drawing attention to the way in which human perception of the world is informed by what is done over periods of time. More recently, it has become clearer that practices do not only affect what knowledge is gained, but what can be perceived at all. How, then, do the practices that make up the craft of anthropology, from fieldwork methods to the daily tasks of university life, shape what is perceivable and knowable to anthropologists? The institution of the university has played a central role in perpetuating epistemicide. Epistemicide, as defined by Modernity /Coloniality/ Decoloniality scholars, is a fundamental aspect of coloniality, through which all and any ways of knowing/being that do not participate in its universalizing epistemic project are delegitimized. What could anthropologists learn if different ways of knowing, and therefore different ways of practicing anthropology, were taken seriously for scholarly enquiry? Could anthropology contribute to developing regenerative and restorative scholarship by taking different ways of knowing seriously?
Followed by a book launch in the Old Library at 51-53 Banbury Road
A Genealogy of Method: Anthropology's Ancestors and the Meaning of Culture by Sondra L. Hausner
Discussants – Chihab El Khachab (SAME, Oxford), Mathijs Pelkmans (Anthropology, LSE)
Departmental Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2024
3.15pm, Fridays of Weeks 1, 3-8.
In person in the Lecture Room, 64 Banbury Road.
Convened by Alpa Shah and Elisabeth Hsu
Week 2 is replaced by the Marett Lecture delivered by Professor Deborah James
