Keynote: “A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology: The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge”
Abstract
The Histories of Anthropology Network (HOAN)addresses anthropology’s multiple histories. The plurality of its mandate constitutes a rallying point for diverse interests across conventional silos of knowledge accumulation and practice, with the potential to reach other audiences and publics in the academy and beyond. I have addressed specific audiences from my vantage point as an interdisciplinary historian of anthropology and linguistics. By and large, the audience for these discourses remains a closed circle of known colleagues and familiar ways of speaking to one another. I argue that the variables emerging in these discourses recur across them. We urgently need a new paradigm retaining the value of the particular, while seeking generalization through cycles of change and geographic location. What I call “transportable knowledge” toggles between them in a paradigm shift from the history of anthropology that emerged in the 1960’s to address causes and rationales of what happened in the past. The new model foregrounds the complexity of decision-making in a rapidly changing world using available information. Read in context, in hindsight non-optimal choices avoid what I call “assassination by anachronism.”
Program
17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Hande Birkalan Gedik
17:05 Keynote speaker: Regna Darnell (University of Western Ontario):
“A Critical Paradigm for the Histories of Anthropology: The Generalization of Transportable Knowledge”
17:25 Open forum for questions and comments
17:30 HOAN Correspondents presentation:
- Peter G.A. Versteeg (Netherlands)
- Vida Savoniakaite (Lithuania)
17:45 Open forum for questions and comments
17:50 Frederico Delgado Rosa, Han Vermeulen: presentation of Ethnographers before Malinowski: Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork (1870-1922), Berghahn, 2022
18:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors
Watch the recording of this meeting here:
