Live EASA/ABA/AAA/CASCA Webinar
September – October 2013
Webinar
La langue et le savoir anthropologique/ Language and anthropological knowledge/ Língua e conhecimento
antropológico/ La lengua en el conocimiento antropológico/
Date of live event: 15th October 2013. A virtual seminar pilot project.
A collaboration of four anthropological associations, EASA/ABA/AAA/CASCA (represented by Susana Narotzky, Bela Feldman-Bianco, Monica Heller, Marie-Nathalie LeBlanc). A multi-platform multi-lingual experiment. We hope you will participate.
Read the introductory PDFs: English -- French -- Portuguese -- Spanish
Background
In 2011, three anthropological associations, EASA, ABA and AAA, agreed to try out a variety of collaborative
endeavours. These are pilot projects which are not meant to create their own hegemony, but rather to open up and
encourage the construction of a global anthropology in practice. The first has been a series of panels at three
scholarly meetings (ABA 2012, AAA 2012, IUAES 2013) under the heading of Desplazamientos y desigualidades/
Deslocamentos e desigualdades/ Displacements and inequalities/ Déplacements et inégalités. We now wish to
propose a different format, under a different theme.
Theme
Língua e conhecimento antropológico/ La lengua en el conocimiento antropológico/ La langue et le savoir
anthropologique/ Language and anthropological knowledge
This virtual seminar aims to explore the centrality of language in the production of anthropological knowledge and its political aspects, in two different albeit connected ways:
- Language is central to the ethnographic encounter and sets the grounds for a potentially unequal interaction in the long term. Anthropologists have choices to make about how to represent the knowledge they produce (in what language, what communicative variety, what genre, what medium) and in what communicative spaces to engage, no matter where they do their work or with whom. These are necessarily going to be shared unequally by all stakeholders, raising issues of power, expropriation and potential misrepresentation with possibilities for important consequences in policy and practice. While these issues have emerged along with the postcolonial critique of the discipline, sustained conversation and debate on equal terms remains minimal. What are the political and epistemological consequences of directly engaging with different accounts of practice and different expressions of knowledge and, by extension, anthropological traditions?
- The global circulation of anthropological knowledge, and the shifting relations of power that it entails, has become more and more salient to anthropologists of all kinds. The growth of international organizations such as the World Council of Anthropological Associations or the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and the increasing attention – and excitement – they attract, are testimony to commitments to greater inclusiveness in participation in the field and to resistance to centralization and hegemony. Anthropologists have begun to pay attention to a variety of issues connected to these efforts, including the role of digitalization, new media, distributed knowledge, and innovative research methods. Apart from some local conversations, however, we have not paid sustained attention to one of the central ways in which knowledge is constructed, circulated and evaluated: language in its different expressions and traditions. We are familiar with debates over the role of English as lingua franca versus global dominator, but have rarely examined the question empirically or engaged in open, systematic debate as a way to overcome the prevailing inequalities and make way for a variety of anthropological expressions.
Format
We want to engage with the challenges of new communicative media and propose to develop this virtual seminar in
various digital platforms (including a YouTube real time projection of the live event with simultaneous Twitter
interaction and blog and e-mail for other moments of the event). The webinar is an experiment both in
collaboration between associations and in the use of IT for facilitating this engagement and extending the
debate.
It will also be an experiment in multi-lingual interaction by scholars native to different language environments
(French, Portuguese and English) that understand all three languages with various degrees of proficiency but are
willing to make the effort at sharing ideas from a position of linguistic equivalence.
Four scholars, from four different parts of the world, will be invited to circulate a short text on the theme in the weeks preceding the live event. These texts will be made available on a platform to which all members of the four associations can choose to have access, for a period of ten days, starting 1 October 2013. During this period viewers can comment on the papers directly through the platform or e-mail. Four additional scholars will be invited to respond to these texts during the live event which will take place on the 15th of October 2013 and will be transmitted live through YouTube. This will be a one-hour webinar discussion among all eight, with the help of a chair and a moderator serving as the link with members interacting to the papers and event. For the following week, association members can participate in an on-line written discussion (that is, not in real time). At the end of that period the seminar will be closed.
