Perhaps the anthropological discipline is now slowly letting go of its positivist baggage and stepping towards the contemporary world: in the opening article of the recent Current Anthropology supplement Engaged anthropology, diversity and dilemmas,(Vol.51, suppl.2, october 2010) Low & Merry highlight how little attention was paid by the peer reviewers of this publication to the concepts of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ which have until now been regularly invoked as a way of legitimating ethnographic research. This may suggest that scholars are slowly recognizing that personal and political engagement in the struggles and demands of the communities they study represent an enrichment of, and not an obstacle to the production of scholarly knowledge. As Micheal Herzfeld (2010) observes in his article in the same publication Gentrification, engagement and the neoliberal hijacking of history, it is an ethical duty of anthropologists to show alternative possibilities to neoliberal cynicism, and to make them accessible and understandable to the public.
- “It’s not just that ‘another world is possible’, but ‘other worlds exist’“. Interview with Beltràn ROCA, editor of Antropología y anarquismo (LaMalatesta, 2008) [critical review of the book]
- Virus press recently translated to spanish David GRAEBER‘s Fragmentos de una antropología anarquista. Download the original in english (2004) for free from Marshall Sahlins’s Prickly Paradigm Press webpage. In italian it was published by Eleuthera (2006) [download]: review by Silvia Ferbri
- Joanne RAPPAPORT (2oo8) Beyond participant observation: collaborative ethnography as theoretical innovation. Collaborative Anthropologies, vol.1, pp.1-31
- Charles HALE (2006) Activist research v. cultural critique: indigenous land rights and the contradictions of politically engaged anthropology. Cultural Anthropology, vol. 21, issue 1. pp.96-120