EASA Celebrates 25 years in Tallinn 2014

The European Association of Social Anthropologists is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The inaugural General Assembly of EASA was held in 1989, in Italy. That year was also marked by the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the World Wide Web. The fall of the Wall in Berlin stands as a symbol for both epochal crisis and opportunity in late twentieth century Europe, and crisis is one, amongst other, iconic tropes of our time. A quarter-century later, Europe is in the midst of a different kind of crisis and one which informs the theme of the association’s biennial conference in Tallinn. The texts available on this page were presented at one of the conference’s plenaries. They address how European anthropology has reacted to and engaged in different revolutions of the 20th century, how it inhabits crisis as an epistemic moment, and how it manages its intimacies and fall-outs. We take our 25th anniversary as an opportunity to locate EASA in the key events of the past century, and to look forward to the role we envision for the future of the association in particular and European anthropology in general in the next 25 years.