Keynote – Beyond the East and the West: Academic Inequalities from a Perspective of Disciplinary History
Observations on contemporary anthropology stress the presence of pervasive inequalities. Divisions between the East and the West (or the Global South and the Global North), encompassing, among other things, the dominance of English language, journals and publishing houses, the unequal access to citations, prestige and grant funding, or the invisibility of non-dominant knowledge, have negative impacts on anthropological knowledge production and the character of world anthropology. Instead of creating a space where every voice is heard, all these phenomena perpetuate a situation of “Western dominance”, which favours some and disfavours others. Without denying the existence of these peculiar and often detrimental “economies of credibility”, I would like to cast the whole problem of dominance and hegemony in a different light and show what we can learn about it with the help of disciplinary history.
Program
17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Katja Geisenhainer, Udo Mischek and Marko Pišev
17:05 Keynote speaker Nikola Balaš (Institute of Ethnology,Charles University)
Beyond the East and the West: Academic Inequalities from a Perspective of Disciplinary History
17:25 Open forum for questions and comments
17:30Michael Kraus (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) presentation of his edited volume Ethnographic Collection at the University of Göttingen
17:45 Open forum for questions and comments
18:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors
Watch the recording of this meeting here
Book presentation
In the meeting Michael Kraus also introduced his edited volume on the Ethnographic Collection at the University of Göttingen. In this volume, 73 authors from 20 countries examine objects and highlight events from the past and present of this collection, from a variety of perspectives. See more about the book here.
