Forum Rethinking Euro‐Anthropology

This forum opens up a debate about the diversity that is European Anthropology and the directions in which it is travelling. To set the scene, we contacted SA/AS’s Editorial Board and other prominent anthropologists, inviting them to write a short comment on the topic. We suggested they might wish to discuss ‘any of the diverse anthropological debates, approaches or issues that have been generated in European universities, and that have made a contribution to your own research’. We also welcomed work/ approaches that are not necessarily ‘generated in European universities’ but that have been, or are, handled differently or with different emphases in Europe as opposed to other parts of the anthropological world. For instance, this could include some of the thoughts about ‘sociality’ vs ‘the cultural’, or work on ‘indigeneity’, or on environment, post-colonialism and so on. We added a comment about being aware that ‘there is nothing holding this diversity together as such; our aim is to try and gain a sense of the range of institutionally, conceptually, socially, politically, economically – perhaps even aesthetically or morally – distinctive ways anthropology has been thought, debated, and practised from one or other European vantage point’. Appreciating that it’s not easy to say much in such a short statement of 500 to 1000 words, the idea was nonetheless to generate some overall snapshot. The purview that has resulted is therefore far from exhaustive. After approaching around 35 people, the Forum below reflects the responses we got. We’ve divided them here into two: the first nine deal, more or less, with such issues as histories, traditions and the impacts of funding, and the second ten address more specific conceptual statements regarding particular research projects or approaches. In casting our net wide, we tried to convey an ethos for beginning a debate, rather than closing or directing one. The idea was simply to invite colleagues to say what was on their mind, so as to start the ball rolling for a longer and more detailed discussion over the next four years. The results, printed here virtually as they were written, are a rich start to satisfying those aims. Some threads to the commentaries are briefly summarised below. Collectively, they raise many of the key issues affecting anthropology today, not only in Europe, but all over the world. Yet there was also something that stood out as an issue of distinctive relevance to the European region, and which to our minds may form a basis for developing the debate considerably further in future issues. In discussing historical, institutional, and national/state differences in anthropological practice (Eriksen, Gregory, Papataxiarchis, Cervinkova, Kuper, Hviding), several