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Anthropology and 1968: Openings and closures
Author(s) -
Rio Knut M.,
Bertelsen Bjørn Enge
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12419
Subject(s) - liminality , cognitive reframing , period (music) , sociology , state (computer science) , rationality , anthropology , authoritarianism , history , epistemology , aesthetics , law , philosophy , politics , political science , psychology , social psychology , democracy , algorithm , computer science
It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter‐insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were formative for anthropology and neighbouring disciplines. We believe that anthropology experienced a liminal period, with Carlos Castaneda and Victor Turner as leading figures, and that the closures and denials of that sense of anti‐structure have marked the discipline after 1968. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari and their account of May 1968 as an event of ‘suffocation’ and a ‘return to the intolerable’.