Over 900 delegates attended the conference over the four days.
Scientific Committee: Andres Barrera-González, Fiona Bowie, Dorle Dracklé, László Kürti, Benoît de L’Éstoile, Jon P. Mitchell, Eleni Papagaroufali, Peter Pels, David P. Shankland, Dimitros Theodossopoulos, Helena Wulff
Local Committee: Fiona Bowie, Wendy Coxshall, Elaine Massung, David P. Shankland, Dimitros Theodossopoulos
Archive
Conference book View PDF
Ethnographic films programme View PDF
Conference poster View A3 PDF
Theme
Our 9th biennial conference encourages us to consider the global dimensions of particular ethnographic encounters. The wider interconnections, the spread of ideas, the dynamic relationships and processes which shape the everyday activity of social life; these lie increasingly at the centre of our methodological and theoretical preoccupations as anthropologists. Mediated by individual, institutional, national developments of enormous complexity, this link between global interchange and local creativity deserves our systematic attention and analysis.
Europe and the World, the specific title of our gathering, provides us with an opportunity to reconsider these ideas close to home and far away: Europe, inevitably, has set part of the epistemological background of our everyday working lives, and, has both for good and for bad, had profound wider influence. The rest of the world, the recipient and the partner in this exchange, may watch, interact, protest, suffer and readapt. We invite you to consider this from the point of view of your fieldwork, writing, analytical perspective, and experience.
The ninth biennial conference location, in the historic maritime city of Bristol, immediately gives precision to this theme in a number of ways: the diffusion of ideas, the growth of mercantilism and international trade, the relationship between diasporas and cultural change, and the extremely complex social phenomenon of empire, invasion and occupation in its widest sense are all quite crucial to the social history of the city and the region, yet at the same time resonate throughout human societies more widely in both modern and pre-modern periods.
From this plethora of possibilities, delegates are invited to consider some of the following further specific areas, upon which there will be invited workshops. Amongst these are ‘Asylum Seekers and Undocumented Persons’; ‘The Black Atlantic’; ‘Diasporas and Migrant Labours’; ‘Unification of Europe’; ‘Museums and the Colonial Past’; ‘Medical Anthropology, Europe and the World’; ‘Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter Revisited’; ‘Ambivalent Europeans’. There will also be three plenary sessions, on ‘Markets and Cultures’; ‘Colonial Legacies’; and ‘Diffusion, Religion and Secularism’ respectively, and a round table specifically on ‘Eastern Europe as a field of anthropological enquiry’.
Keynote
Jean Comaroff (Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, University of Chicago)
Law and disorder in the postcolony: is Europe evolving toward Africa?
Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than European nation-states? The usual answer, both scholarly and popular, is yes. In this essay, I suggest that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by modes of governance, sorts of empire, and species of wealth that conspire ever more to criminalizes poverty and race, and deflect corruption south of the border. But there is also another side to all this: while many postcolonies live in states of endemic disorder, a large number of them fetishise the law, its ways and means. How are we to explain the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities? In Law and disorder in the postcolony: is Europe evolving toward Africa? I address this question, and argue that postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.