World Anthropologies: Anthropological Cosmopolitanisms and Cosmopolitics
World Anthropologies: Anthropological Cosmopolitanisms and Cosmopolitics
World Anthropologies: Anthropological Cosmopolitanisms and Cosmopolitics
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World Anthropologies:
Anthropological
Cosmopolitanisms and
Cosmopolitics
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
Department of Anthropology, University of Brasilia, Brasilia DF 70910-900,
Brazil; email: [email protected]
Keywords
Abstract
To present the world anthropologies project (WA), this article explores
the existence of three kinds of anthropological cosmopolitanisms and cosmopolitics: imperial, liberal, and radical. Imperial cosmopolitics reproduces
the hegemony of the Anglo-American core in the world system of anthropological production. Liberal cosmopolitics is a step ahead but naturalizes
the Wests prominent place in the global production of knowledge. Radical
cosmopolitics is currently epitomized by the WA. It problematizes AngloAmerican centrality and criticizes Eurocentrism. The WA is a hybrid of
diverse theoretical and political debates. It has important singularities: It is
not located in the disciplines center, and it is a political critique of and action
against the existing global anthropological hierarchy. Critical transnationalism and cosmopolitanism are sources of inspiration for the WA. The WA
believes that anthropologists can take advantage of globalizations heterodox
opportunities to go beyond metropolitan provincialism, to improve the conditions of conversability, and to benefit from the diversity of anthropologies
and from the resulting heteroglossic cross-fertilizations.
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ICAES: International
Congress of
Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences
The ambition of anthropological thoughtto think humankind in its unicity and variation
has historically placed anthropologists in the midst of cosmopolitan ideologies and utopias. It is
difficult to know whether people are attracted to anthropology because they are cosmopolitans
or whether abstract notions such as culture(s), society, kinship, and humankind turn them into
cosmopolitans. Hannerz (1996) posits that a true interest in and engagement with alterity are at
the core of cosmopolitanism.1 Among Western academic disciplines, anthropology is defined by
a wanting to understand the structures of alterity (Krotz 2002). Fabian (2012, p. 64) reaffirms this
disciplinary singularity, sees alterity as a theoretical concept that was useful to criticize ideological
views of cultural differences, and reasserts its essential epistemological role as the unifying issue
of the discipline regardless of where anthropologists are located, in the West or elsewhere. In
sum, cosmopolitanism, alterity, and anthropology go hand in hand.
Going to faraway lands has played a central role in the disciplines constitution and consolidation, especially after ethnography, in the first half of the twentieth century, became one of its
central tenets. In 1960, Felix Keesing (1960, p. 198), after a survey on anthropologys international organizations in which he consulted a considerable number of anthropologists in different
countries, found that the science was one in which scholars traveled or communicated by correspondence to an unusual degree. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, and more so in the past
30 years when the discipline increasingly globalized itself, anthropologists have woven innumerable transnational webs of scholarly exchange and influence. Anthropological cosmopolitanisms
are sometimes set in motion, and anthropologists attempt to deploy their international agency.
International conferences, for instance, are opportunities to connect with colleagues from other
countries and to set international agendas. They have been organized in the nineteenth century as
exemplified by the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology, founded
in La Spezia, Italy, in 1865 (Keesing 1960) and by the International Congress of Anthropology
held in Chicago in 1894 (Wake 1894). But only in 1934 was a supranational organization founded:
the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES).
To explore the nature of anthropological cosmopolitanisms I need to emphasize two of their
main characteristics. First, the profession is rooted in a worldview based on the respect for human
diversity. Second, anthropology calls for agents and agencies that, albeit anchored in national
scenarios, sometimes become politically active on a supranational level. I see the interest, academic
or otherwise, in the diversity of human life and the international actions of anthropologists as
cosmopolitics. For the purposes of this article, I understand cosmopolitics as (a) discourses and
modes of doing politics concerned with their global reach and impact (Ribeiro 2006, p. 364) and
(b) discourses that attempt to make sense of human diversity and of alterity (on cosmopolitics,
see also Cheah & Robbins 1998, Ribeiro 2003). When discussing world anthropologies, I am
particularly interested in
cosmopolitics that are embedded in conflicts regarding the role of difference and diversity in the
construction of polities. I view anthropology as a cosmopolitics about the structure of alterity (Krotz
1997) that pretends to be universal but that, at the same time, is highly sensitive to its own limitations
and to the efficacy of other cosmopolitics. (Ribeiro 2006, pp. 36465)
1
Cosmopolitanism is a Western notion that epitomizes the need to conceive of a political and cultural entity, larger than ones
homeland, that would encompass all human beings on a global scale (Ribeiro 2001, p. 2842). It presupposes a positive
attitude towards difference, a wish to construct broad allegiances and equal and peaceful global communities of citizens
who should be able to communicate across cultural and social boundaries forming a universalist solidarity (Ribeiro 2001,
p. 2842). On the 1990s debate on cosmopolitanism, see Neilson (1999).
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WA: world
anthropologies project
Danda (1995, p. 23) gives the Indian example of the Manava Dharmashastra (The Sacred Science of Man), written in 1350 BC; see
also Chaabani (2012) who views Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a Persian scholar (9731048), and Ibn Khaldoun, a Tunisian scholar
(13321406), as harbingers of anthropology. But note that my conception of anthropological knowledge as cosmopolitics
includes the oral knowledge of lowland South American Indians, for instance, on the existence of people different from them
(see Albert 1995 on the discourses of the Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa).
www.annualreviews.org World Anthropologies
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AAA: American
Anthropological
Association
IUAES: International
Union of
Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences
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English is unproblematized as the global scientific language. This scenario does not involve only
exotic tropical lands and natives. Spanish anthropologist Isidoro Moreno (Guarne 2012, p. 11)
used the expression anthropological colonialism to describe the behavior and production of
British anthropologists who studied and exoticized Andalusian culture (see also Narotzky 2006).
Although in the past the core of the world system of anthropological production (Kuwayama
2004) was composed of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, the current global
hegemony of US academia makes the United States the key producer of imperial cosmopolitics.
In a critical essay, Dominguez (2012) hypothesizes an imperial scenario of global anthropological
cooperation dominated by American anthropology, a scenario in which the American Anthropological Association (AAA), by far the largest disciplinary organization in the world, would become
the sole global association. For Mathews (2011, p. 48), non-American anthropologists must sound
like Americans in their theorizing and working if they want to be heard by Americans, a point
Kuwayama (2004, p. 10) had also made. Imperial anthropological cosmopolitics amounts to what
De LEstoile (2008) called the gravitational power of hegemonic internationalization and is the
main target of the WA critique. Imperial cosmopolitics are basically a power effect of the centrality
of American academia in the world. In its exacerbated form, it is a handmaiden of imperialism, the
latest example of which is the so-called weaponization of anthropology. I do not further explore
the imperial anthropological cosmopolitics because they have been consistently discussed in works
such as Asad (1973), Copans (1975), Gonzalez (2009), Gough (1968), Jorgensen & Wolf (1970),
and Price (2011).
Liberal anthropological cosmopolitics share with imperial ones the quiet acceptance of the
hegemony of Western canons and institutional power. The best way to describe liberal cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics is to compare them with global governance agencies whose mission is
to keep the global status quo while giving the impression that they endeavor to reach more
democratic international decision-making processes. Hegemonic centers agree to share their international power provided their positions are left unthreatened through mechanisms that grant
them a differentiated decision-making capacity or by controlling the flows of economic, political,
and symbolic capitals. Although a step ahead of imperial cosmopolitics, liberal cosmopolitics do
not put at risk the rhetorical internationalism (Dominguez 2012, p. 53) of US institutions. In
the history of anthropological cosmopolitanisms, this kind of cosmopolitics reflects mostly European and US cosmopolitanisms that have, more often than not, cross-fertilized each other. The
theoretical capacity and contributions of nonhegemonic anthropologies are usually ignored.
Following in this section, I explore the characteristics of social agencies and agents that illustrate
the works and deeds of liberal cosmopolitics. The organizing by British anthropologists of the
ICAES, in London in 1934, is perhaps the first example of an initiative inspired in European
anthropological cosmopolitanism and liberal cosmopolitics. After World War II, in 1948, under
the auspices of the Paris-based United Nations Educational and Scientific Council, the ICAES
would become the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES),
even now the only global anthropological institution. PostWorld War II decolonizing movements
helped to reduce the prominence of former European colonial powers. In this period, the global
supremacy of the United States increased on all fronts. Not surprisingly, the 1950s may be seen as
the decade when American dominance in world anthropology started to consolidate. For Vidyarthi
(1974, p. 21) with the decline of colonial anthropology of the British, Dutch and French brands,
the Americanizing influence in anthropology has almost enjoyed a monopoly. Some events were
indications of this growing leadership, such as the organization of the 1956 IUAES world congress
in Philadelphia.
But nothing matches the importance that an institution founded in New York would have in
bringing about a hybrid of American and European anthropological cosmopolitan liberal style with
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a growing dominance of the first. Established in 1941 by Hungarian-born Paul Fejos, the Viking
Fund would become in 1951 the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (WGF),
in honor of the Swedish industrialist who provided its endowment. This American foundation had,
in its beginnings, a European accent, and from 1958 to 1980 it would hold a European Conference
Center in a castle in Austria.
Vidyarthi (1974, p. 13) considers the 1952 Wenner-Gren International Symposium Anthropology Today as the watershed of the emerging American model in anthropology. It was the
first of a long series of international symposia that for more than six decades have often become
hallmarks in the history of the discipline. Eighty-one scholars from around the world met in
New York (Stocking 2000). Furthermore, the 1952 event was also published as the influential
volume Anthropology Today, edited by Alfred Kroeber (1953), with the ambitious subtitle of an
encyclopedic inventory, meaning everything that anthropologists knew until that point in time.
Another result of the event was the book An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (1953), edited by
Sol Tax, Loren Eiseley, Irving Rouse, and Carl Voegelin, which is an account of the discussions
that took place at the symposium. The two books were so widely acclaimed that the American
Anthropologist invited several anthropologists to write reviews that occupied 25 pages of its 1954
third volume. The Anthropology Today symposium was proposed by Paul Fejos, the founder
and at that point Director of Research of the WGF. He wanted the event to serve as an inspiration
for the Foundations future policies (Silverman 2009, p. 949).
The particular blend of European-American cosmopolitanism that developed in the first
decades of the WGF would have been impossible without the leadership of Paul Fejos (1897
1963). He was a Renaissance man (Dodds 1963, p. 405), a cosmopolitan, multilingual, multitalented Hungarian (Silverman 2009, p. 949) who migrated to the United States in 1922 and
became a successful film director in Hollywood before establishing the Foundation, which he led
with unparalleled brilliance (Dodds 1963, p. 405) from its inauguration in 1941 until his death in
1963. John Dodds (1973) wrote Fejoss biography and a eulogy in which he praises Fejoss ability,
as a product of a European culture (Dodds 1963, p. 405) free from the abracadabra of the social
sciences as frozen in the American mold, to shift the center of gravity of anthropology and
reduce the insularity of American anthropology by making it aware of its world connections.
Fejos had partners in this endeavor. Several were first-generation Americans, such as Kroeber,
who was of German descent and a student of Franz Boas, the German-American anthropologist
considered the father of US anthropology. But among Fejoss partners, it was Tax who came to
incarnate the world mission of liberal democratic anthropology, as Stocking (2000) put it, or
the American liberal cosmopolitics as I submit.
Tax was a child of Russian Jewish migrants, secular despite their descent from rabbis, socialist in their political leanings, a student of Ralph Linton, an institution builder whose
forte was more organizational than theoretical and who moved firmly into the role of master impresario of world anthropology (Silverman 2009, p. 949).3 He was involved in the planning and administration of several major international congresses. Tax and Fejos first cooperated in the organization of a conference in Middle American ethnology in 1949. A few years
later, Tax would be an editor of one of the volumes that came out of the 1952 Anthropology Today International Symposium. For both men, anthropology was the most comprehensive knowledge of humankind and a connected enterprise of scholars worldwide (Silverman
2009, p. 950). Their vision was also that anthropology had to face universal issues and practical
questions.
WGF: Wenner-Gren
Foundation for
Anthropological
Research
The next three paragraphs are based on Silverman (2009). See also Stocking (2000).
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It was this worldview that congealed in 1959 into a social experiment (Silverman 2009,
p. 950), the WGF-funded world journal, Current Anthropology, intended to change international
anthropology by changing the ways anthropologists communicated on a global level. Tax would
later take further steps in the globalization of anthropology. He organized and chaired the ninth
International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1973 in Chicago. He
wanted this meeting to be another global overview of the state of the art in anthropology and to
become a landmark for the future of the discipline in which scholars from outside the Western
metropolitan centers would play an ever larger role (Acciaioli 2011, p. 23).
Liberal anthropological cosmopolitics can inspire innovative initiatives such as when Tax,
aiming at a participatory democracy of scholars in exchanging information, traveled around the
globe to listen to anthropologists before drawing the final contour of the Current Anthropology
project. He viewed the journal as a clearinghouse where associates (he dreamed to recruit 4,000 of
them) would actively participate in a worldwide community in spite of the unavoidable American
dominance, given a U.S.-based editor and sponsor (Silverman 2009, p. 953). Another important
endeavor was the translation of the discussions held during the 1973 Chicago congress into English,
French, German, Russian, and Spanish (Acciaioli 2011). More than 40 years later, this kind of
language politics is far from being common: Quite the contrary, English speakers increasingly
naturalize the hegemonic role their language plays in global academic communication (Mathews
2011). Tax would also foster the publication of almost 100 volumes issuing from the 1973 ICAES
in a series entitled World Anthropology.
Acciaioli indicates the limits of Taxs liberal cosmopolitics compared with the more radical pluralism of the WA (Acciaioli 2011, pp. 22, 2627). Although surely open to cosmopolitan dialogues,
Tax did not see the gatekeeping role of Northern epistemologies (Harrison 2012, p. 87) behind
his belief in universalism and did not question the hegemonic position of Western anthropology.
As Acciaioli (2011, p. 22) puts it, Tax was committed to certain (universalizing) epistemological
and political tenets of the Western tradition. His goal was to enhance world anthropology
not to foster world anthropologies. The difference between the singular and the plural is not
innocuous. For Restrepo & Escobar (2005, p. 100), two of the founders of the World Anthropologies Network (WAN), rather than assuming that there is a privileged position from which a real
anthropology (in the singular) can be produced and in relation to which all other anthropologies
would define themselves, the WA takes seriously the geopolitics of knowledge, i.e., the multiple
and contradictory historical, social, cultural and political locatedness of the different communities
of anthropologists and their anthropologies.
WAN: World
Anthropologies
Network
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emphasize the unequal relations between hegemonic and nonhegemonic centers of anthropological production located within and without nation-states. It is thus influenced by the notion that
there is a geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo 2001) that is historically related to the unbalanced
power distribution within the world system of anthropological production (Kuwayama 2004).
World anthropologies assume that (a) anthropologists value diversity as a means to improving understanding and creativity and that consequently it is possible to mobilize them to delve into the
disciplines own diversity and take advantage of it; (b) it is possible to enhance cross-fertilization
if anthropologists profit from the heterodox opportunities opened by globalization processes of
the past 25 years, such as e-communication (Reuters 2011), which made bypassing hegemonic
centers a real possibility; (c) there is a need to avoid the gravitational power of hegemonic internationalization (De LEstoile 2008), that is, of imperial and liberal cosmopolitics, to go beyond
the monotony of an academic universe dominated by Anglo-American perspectives and to build
heteroglossic global exchanges; (d ) universality as a notion dominated by a Eurocentric vision of
epistemological achievements is to be left behind in favor of diversality, that is, the possibility of
accepting epistemic diversity as a universal project.4 The WA is not guided by a multiculturalist
agenda; rather, it is influenced by the Latin American discussion on interculturality (see Bartolome
2006, Rappaport 2005). The valorization of other anthropologies and anthropologies otherwise
(Restrepo & Escobar 2005) needs to be done concomitant with a critique of the conditions created
by modernity and the coloniality of power (Castro-Gomez
& Grosfoguel 2007, Quijano 1993)
4
The most important programmatic statements of the WA may be found in World Anthropologies Collective (2003), Restrepo
& Escobar (2005), Ribeiro (2006), and Ribeiro & Escobar (2006a). Acciaioli (2011) synthesizes the WAs proposals.
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should not imply the isolation of Western fellows; the task was to liberate anthropology from
domination by any country or group (Fahim 1982a, p. 150). To avoid assuming the centrality,
dominance, and patronship of Western anthropology, he concluded that the contributions
of third world anthropologies should not be seen as responses or accessories to Western
anthropological knowledge; rather equality and reciprocity should be the key notions toward
the development of a world anthropology (Fahim 1982a, p. 151).
The interest that the WGF has kept in anthropological cosmopolitanisms is congruent with
the Foundations own history. However, the WGFs support of and participation in pioneering
ventures such as the World Council of Anthropological Associations do not mean they are outcomes of the Foundations policy or imagination. Rather, they mean that radical anthropological
cosmopolitics may find constructive alliances in the hegemonic centers and that many leaders in
the discipline are open to criticism and new visions.5
Many relevant contributions developed without the participation of the WGF. Besides the
WAN, perhaps the most outstanding one was the 1982 volume of the Swedish journal Ethnos,
edited by Tomas Gerholm and Ulf Hannerz. In the introduction to the volume, Gerholm &
Hannerz (1982) coined a metaphor about the lack of communication among national anthropologies seen as islands that communicated only through bridges with international anthropologies
located in the continent. Other important essays were written by Mexican anthropologist Krotz
(1997) on anthropologies of the South as well as by Brazilian anthropologist Cardoso de Oliveira
(1999/2000) on peripheral and central anthropologies and the problem of mutual ignorance among
them. Japanese anthropologist Kuwayamas (2004) book on the world system of anthropological
production should also be noted. Finally, over the past 20 years several volumes were published.
They aimed either at portraying anthropologys diversity (Boskovic 2008, De lEstoile et al. 2002)
or discussing regional or national anthropological traditions (Cardoso de Oliveira 1988; Das 2003;
Daveluy & Dorais 2009; Grimson et al. 2004; Miceli 1999; Ntarangwi et al. 2006; Ribeiro &
Trajano 2004; Skalnk 2002, 2005; Uberoi et al. 2008b; Vermeulen & Rodan 1995; Visacovsky
& Guber 2003; Yamashita et al. 2004; among others). These volumes epitomize other productive
entries to further sophisticate the debate on world anthropologies.
5
Buchowski (2014, p. 2) rightly wrote that the WA was met with support from highly self-conscious intellectual traditions,
above all the Francophone one (The Lausanne Manifesto), from several allies within the dominant anthropology who opposed
metropolitan provincialism and from the ignored and alienated traditions in new postcommunist territories, which up to
that point merely impulsively resisted domination, as well as many others dispersed across the globe.
6
Later, De la Cadena moved to the University of California at Davis, and Eduardo Restrepo returned to Bogota, where
he teaches at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Colleagues who were not Latin American soon joined the WA; Susana
Narotsky (University of Barcelona) is one example.
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enunciation composed of certain critical intellectual and political genealogies. More importantly,
such intellectual practices are also performed outside the academic milieu, reflecting a preoccupation with the political usages of knowledge and involvements with different social actors and
movements as well as interventions in public policies. In this field of action, Latin American scholars also articulate themselves with international organisms and with human rights, indigenous,
Afro-Latin American, feminist, grassroots education, environmentalist, and other kinds of social
movements and nongovernmental organizations (Mato 2002, p. 38). This is why, as Mato (2002,
p. 38) puts it, the preferred Latin American self-identification is intellectual and not scholar.
Following are some of the relevant components that constituted the progressive Latin American mindset from the 1970s through the 1990s: antiauthoritarian, antiracist, and profound democratic convictions; Andean debates on interculturalidad and mestizaje; Marxism and leftist political
organizations; dependency theory; the critique of development; grassroots environmentalism;
Michel Foucaults discourse analysis; Antonio Gramscis theory of hegemony; and portions of
anti-American imperialism. There is no doubt though that the WAs founding figures are hybrids
of progressive European, American, and Latin American cosmopolitanisms because they have
different ties with the US academic milieu. Although educated in their home countries (De la
Cadena did her undergraduate in Peru and two MA courses in Europe; Escobar and Restrepo did
their BA degrees in Colombia; and Ribeiro did his BA and MA degrees in Brazil), all have doctoral
degrees from American universities. Two of them, De la Cadena and Escobar, have made their
professional careers in the United States. World anthropologies show, again, that cosmopolitics
are hybrids by definition.7 But the Latin American stamp is not a minor characteristic. Although
the WA keeps strong relations with critical transnational anthropologists working at the center
and with some of its liberal cosmopolitics, the WA did not originate nor is it located there, nor is
it led by American anthropologists.
However, the centrality of American and European anthropologies turns them into strategic
loci of political action. Thus the WAN made its first public appearance in the 101st AAA meeting,
held in 2001 in New Orleans. In 2003, Social Anthropology, the European Association of Social
Anthropologists journal, published a WA manifesto (World Anthropol. Collect. 2003). The Networks main immediate goal was to organize an international symposium to carry on consistent
face-to-face debates and to develop a website to facilitate the interaction of world anthropologists.
The symposium took place in Italy in 2003. Sponsored by the WGF, it gathered scholars from all
continents. The website (http://www.ram-wan.net/index.html) and the WAN e-Journal, the
first issue of which was published in 2005, were organized by voluntary collective work and are
administered in Colombia. The book, World Anthropologies (Ribeiro & Escobar 2006b), a product
of the 2003 international symposium, remains the most comprehensive statement on the WA.
Over the past 10 years, several sessions in congresses in different countries were organized to
discuss the subject, corroborating the notion introduced by the book that the time was ripe for
world anthropologies.
Currently the most active and visible outcome of the WA political perspective is the World
Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). In 2004, I convened, in Recife, Brazil, a meeting
of 14 presidents of some of the largest national and international anthropological associations.
After three day-long conversations, the WCAA was founded in the congress of the Brazilian
Association of Anthropology. The presidents meeting was sponsored by the WGF, which has
continuously supported the Councils existence. Currently, the WCAA is composed of more
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7
Buchowski (2014, p. 2) considers that the history of World Anthropologies replicates a trajectory of many other emancipatory
movements. It was up to intellectuals trained in the power centers to formulate emancipatory thoughts.
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than 40 members and is a most influential presence on global anthropological politics. It has
enabled the appearance of new global political networks, visions, and leadership.8 In 2009, several
WCAA leaders became members of the Executive Committee of the International Union of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and started to further its reorganization by promoting
a more democratic constitution and a successful world congress in 2013 in Manchester (Spiegel
2014). This new moment of the IUAES brings hope that anthropologists can further consolidate
their academic global exchange in a solid institutional environment open to the participation of
colleagues from all over the world.
Another WA-inspired initiative was the launching, in 2008, of the AAA Commission on World
Anthropologies. In 2010, it became a Committee, a more permanent body of the association.9 Its
objectives are to identify significant issues that are shared among anthropologists from different
nations. Develop clear objectives for drawing U.S. and international anthropologists together in
ways that benefit anthropology globally. Engage a diversity of international voices and perspectives
and involve both academic and applied anthropologists in this endeavor (Am. Anthropol. Assoc.
2014). The Committee on World Anthropologies is composed of international and American
scholars and has made consistent efforts to disseminate other anthropological knowledges within
American academia. It has become a forum to query how U.S. engagement with public issues can
become less imperialistic and more collaborative (Low & Merry 2011, p. 94). In 2014, in response
to the Committees suggestions, the American Anthropologist started a world anthropology section
to address the origins and ongoing concerns of anthropology around the world (Weil 2014,
p. 160).
Following years of internal WCAA debates and three open sessions organized by the Committee on World Anthropologies in AAA meetings with tens of editors of some of the main anthropological journals to discuss how to pluralize editorial policies regarding style and language, the
WCAA launched its own online journal Dej`a Lu (Already Read ). Starting in 2012, it republishes,
in any language, articles selected by anthropological journals (http://www.wcaanet.org/dejalu).
This kind of intervention in anthropological publishing is a particularly strategic effort because it
allows for the exposure of the heterogeneity of contemporary anthropology.
FINAL COMMENTS
Some of the issues the WA has tackled are subject to theoretical debates; others are related
to historiographic revisionism, to different political positionings, or to a combination of these
elements. Among them, I highlight the following: anthropology as a Eurocentric or universal
approach, the unequal dissemination mechanisms of the discipline on the global and national
levels, hegemony in the academic world, theoretical dependency or intellectual autonomy, the
usage of language in scholarly communication, different academic styles, and epistemologies.
These subjects revolve around the issues of cosmopolitanism versus localism and of the power
imbalance among loci of knowledge production.
The fact that the quest for anthropological knowledge is universal boosted the disciplines
dissemination worldwide. Anthropology was thus borrowed in many loci of knowledge production
8
The founding and development of the WCAA are the result of the cooperation of many colleagues, the vast majority of
which is not related to the WA. But given my role in the creation of the WAN and of the WCAA, I may say that the idea to
convene the 2004 Recife meeting was motivated by the ongoing WA debates in the early 2000s. I want to acknowledge the
importance of the Japanese colleagues in the consolidation of the WCAA (especially Junji Koizumi) and of the German-born
Australian anthropologist Thomas Reuter.
9
Setha Low and Virginia Dominguez were the presidents of the AAA when the Commission and the Committee were created.
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and (un)wittingly disallowed local anthropological knowledges or entered into hybrid relations
of varied degrees with them, creating different disciplinary styles. The Japanese and Indian cases
provide useful scenarios to think about the resulting conundrums. Yamashita (2006) raises an
apparently simple question: If anthropology is a Western discipline, how does one explain the
existence of a Japanese anthropology since the late nineteenth century? His question points to the
fact that imitation and mimesis are not always a surrender to powerful others or to colonialism.
The Indian debates on Western social sciences, their interpretations and uses (Das & Randeria
2014), are particularly powerful because of their immediate relationships to postcolonial politics,
highly complex processes of nation building, and the political uses of traditional knowledges.
Many of the founding fathers of Indian anthropology and sociology believed that mastering the
science of the colonizer was the essential first step to qualify for self-rule and establish India as
a modern nation-state (Uberoi et al. 2008a, p. 32). The ideal was to be modern without being
Western (Uberoi et al. 2008a, p. 32). Whatever the positioning about the adequacy of Western
notions to interpret India, these debates epitomize how Western knowledge is a default setting
that ends up creating phantoms, ambiences where desire and reality intersect, where autonomy
and dependency are fought. The Japanese and Indian cases send a warning about generalizations
that efface local agency, contradictions, and complicities between global and local agents and
that conceal imitations subversive force because nothing is pure replication and thus new critical
interpretations and practices may always arise (Bhabha 1994).
However, because the expansion of the West is also an expansion of power systems in which
literature and science played important roles (Pratt 1992, Said 1994), there is no space for naivete.
The current zeitgeist is characterized by a huge concentration of power in a unique hegemonic
center, the Anglo-American academia. This may be why the intellectual and political preoccupations underneath the WA surpass anthropologys borders as evidenced by a book commissioned by
the International Sociological Association (Patel 2010) and the World Social Science Report, 2010:
Knowledge Divides (UNESCO/ISSC 2010).10 The WA also identifies with the valuing of nonacademic knowledge. In consequence, WA has a strong interest in a growing literature on theories
from the South and in debates against epistemicide that appreciate the emergence and visibility of
indigenous theories (for instance, Comaroff & Comaroff 2012, Connel 2007, Nava Morales 2013,
Smith 1999, Souza Santos & Meneses 2009).
In the eyes of the WA cosmopolitics, anthropology will lose its Western biases when new conditions of conversability arise globally and symmetrical comparisons and dialogical partnerships
(Cardoso de Oliveira 2008) develop among local anthropologists, local anthropological knowledges, and the expanding discipline of anthropology. Only then will metropolitan provincialism,
the arrogant ignorance of the center, be surpassed by provincial cosmopolitanism, the yet-to-befully-considered richness of multiple global fragmented spaces of anthropological production.
AN43CH30-Ribeiro
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
I was (a) one of the founders of the World Anthropologies Network, (b) one of the founders of the
World Council of Anthropological Associations and its first chair, and (c) one of the first co-chairs
of the Committee on World Anthropologies of the American Anthropological Association.
10
Interestingly enough, both volumes include articles with similar titles: One Social Science or Many? (Elster 2010) and
One Sociology or Many? (Sztompka 2010).
494
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I want to thank the anonymous reviewers who helped me to enhance my arguments in this article.
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Contents
Annual Review of
Anthropology
Volume 43, 2014
Perspectives
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
Jane H. Hill 1
Biological Anthropology
vii
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Imitation
Michael Lempert 379
Sociocultural Anthropology
Secrecy
Graham M. Jones 53
Neoliberalism
Tejaswini Ganti 89
Contents
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Transnational Humanitarianism
Miriam Ticktin 273
Informed Consent: The Politics of Intent and Practice in Medical
Research Ethics
Klaus Hoeyer and Linda F. Hogle 347
Ethnographies of Encounter
Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel 363
Health, Risk, and Resilience: Interdisciplinary Concepts and
Applications
Catherine Panter-Brick 431
Theme 1: Risk
Secrecy
Graham M. Jones 53
Imitation
Michael Lempert 379
Health, Risk, and Resilience: Interdisciplinary Concepts and
Applications
Catherine Panter-Brick 431
Theme 2: Knowledge
Contents
ix
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Contents