The Building Blocks of Anthropological Knowledge Production in the 21st Century

Abstract (English)

How anthropological knowledge is produced has a long contested history and is indeed baked into the fabric of the discipline. ‘Modern anthropology’ of the early 20th century has had a profound impact on imaginations of the discipline but its founding moment is not the one that we are in anymore. The reflexive and decolonial turns have forced us to deeply question how we practice anthropology and how we position ourselves within the institutions we find ourselves in.

This paper’s contribution is to appreciate some of the main social processes which give shape to how we ensure anthropology can contend with a 21st century which has left its infancy: a continued creep of neoliberal bureaucracy which restructures the functioning of departments of anthropology and continued pressures to massify universities despite dwindling resources. This is done in engagement with the aforementioned contestations which have characterised anthropology. I draw on experiences of working at one of the oldest distance learning institutions in the world, that being the University of South Africa, located in the Global South, for the last decade or so. Without the traditional model of contact being possible, a setting such as mine, mediated primarily through online affordances, requires a deep appreciation for what is foundational to the discipline. In a sense, the basic building blocks identified in Turner’s rites de passage. The argument which I will put forward is that a type of back to basics has productive value and it can help us to buffer against the worst consequences of what the moment is that many of us find ourselves in worldwide. More than this, I aim to show how this can be a good fit for better equipping new aspirant anthropologists in whichever way they seek to apply what they learn in the discipline – be within the academy or outside of it.