Portuguese anthropology and EASA: from 1990 to 2014. Reflections from the south European countries in times of crises
It is a pleasure and an honour to be at this plenary celebrating the EASA’s 25th anniversary.
In 1990, the first EASA conference was held in Portugal, in Coimbra, at a time when Portuguese anthropology was undergoing an expansion process.
In the dictatorial regime that lasted in Portugal until 1974, the place of anthropology was limited to the support of the colonial administration and the ethnographic survey of a barely modern rural country. In the post-revolutionary decade, anthropological research responded to the key challenge of freeing the conceptions of “portugality” from the ideological ties bequeathed by the dictatorship.
By the end of the 1980’s Portuguese anthropology was vibrant, but lacked the capacity to engage in international debates.
The creationof the EASA in 1989was an important turn point for Anthropology and it’s first Conference was a success. It was the beginning of a period of change in circulation, in the dialogues and in the ways of practicing anthropology, in an intense movement that ended the barriers dividing worlds, promoting the exchange of ideas and critical thinking, which is the cornerstone of social sciences and of anthropology itself.
Twenty-five years later, we witness a permanent circulation of researchers, teachers, students and ideas between European countries. There are grants, joint projects, collective publications, networks and channels that foster the circulation of knowledge, practices and theoretical developments.
In our peripheral condition, Portuguese anthropologists were very successful in addressing the challenges of contemporary science. We managed to create a distinctive voice through the articulation of the networks in Europe and the Atlantic world, namely with vibrant anthropologies from the Portuguese speaking world such as Brazilian anthropology. These bridges for collaboration are one of the most important outcomes of EASA.
Given the economic and bureaucratic constraints that emerged by the end of the decade of 2010, as well as the new ideologies in the research policies coming from the European Union funding programs, EASA has now a new challenge: we must keep alive what we have built together, preserving our way of doing anthropology as a place of creativity and cognitive adventure avoiding the quantitative and policy driven turn in researchfunding.
This is no small challenge! The next coming years will certainly be bleak, due to another long and paralysing period of recession in southern Europe with tragic results for social sciences and anthropology in particular.
As is well known, one of themost devastating consequences of the “crisis” in Southern European countries werethe applied “structural adjustment policies”, which focusing on reducing public deficit, savagely attacked the areas of education and health care. By punishing these countries for having “wasted” resources to pursue the reaching of European developmental standards, the goal of convergence with central and northern Europe is definitely over. The crisis and its subsequent adjustments will place southern Europe permanently on the periphery consequently ending the basis of the European project
In Spain, Greece and Portugal cuts made in Education were severely applied in research funding, particularly affecting the amounts available for the social sciences (which were already smaller than those of northern Europe).With the quasi disappearance of public funding, a whole new generation of young, and not so young, anthropologists is facing an uncertain future, as a consequence of the abrupt changes brought about by the economic crisis in the European project. The remarkable work done in the previous decades is thus at risk. Many had to seek abroad the means to continue their careers. Likewise, anthropologists from around the world who had found in Portugal or in Spain creative environments for their research – and who were an important contribution to the dynamism of the local anthropological projects during the 1900’ and the 2000’s – were forced to move on once again.
Nevertheless, one must bear in mind that the marginalisation of the social sciences and humanities is not just the result of cuts in funding. It is mainly the result of political and ideological orientations whichdefine that research should be in line with economic and technological development. We are talking about politics of knowledge. Funding policies all over Europe are giving preference to research with an entrepreneurial scope, aiming to address societal challenges that support the development of public policies. In this context, the threats to anthropology are increasing.
However, apart from the concrete problems that the crisis brought to the development of anthropology, it is necessary to draw attention to the fact that the crisis in itself is an extraordinary terrain for research and reflection, in pair with the increasing theorizations on inequality in the contemporary world. Ironically, the effects of austerity resulting from the crisis, which are threatening the discipline in several countries, became a relevant field of reflection to many anthropologists who seek to understand the new social contexts created by the growth of poverty, inequality, social polarization, and the reactions to traditional political systems and their connection to the global capitalist system.
Anthropology is particularly well placed to describe and understand these changes in the everyday life of people in social contexts of crisis, deprivation and austerity. By approaching life experiences and the subjectivity, ethnography rends visible frameworks of interpersonal relations, andanalyses the ways in which the crisis affects people and their livelihoods, transforming them, transforming their social networks and, building on their experienced viewpoints, constructs a critical perspective that overcomes the simplistic dichotomy between particular livelihoods and contemporary global capitalism.
This is why EASA is of central importance to the challenges that anthropology is facing in these times of crises. In times of an economic crisis, it is urgent that EASA become a voice in the funding agencies all over Europe, not only in the central European Research Council. It is also imperative that EASA is heard by the agencies that define funding policies for research and science development. In times of a philosophical crisis of the importance of anthropological knowledge for a better understanding of the complexity of social life, it is crucial that EASA develops creative ways to show the relevance of the knowledge that we produce to re-humanize economics, identifying the complexity of lived experiences as shared knowledge.
To conclude let’s go back to the title of this 13thEASA’sbiannual conference:Collaboration, Intimacy and Revolution. We have collaborated; in doing so we have become intimate. Now we must think if we have to make a revolution to guarantee that we have the kind of Anthropology that we stand for the next 25 years.
