ISP - Sessions

ENGAGING ANTHROPOLOGY: EXPERIENCES FROM SCANDINAVIA

Session Abstract: Speaking up on critical social issues has a long tradition in anthropology. It was done by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Franz Boas, who were not always applauded for this in anthropological circles. While some argue that anthropology withdrew into a cocoon after World War II, becoming nearly invisible in the public sphere, there are important exceptions. American anthropologists have been strongly engaged in the challenges faced by indigenous peoples. Further calls for a more engaged anthropology have been made as anthropologists have engaged with advocacy and informed policy work concerning war, climate change, disaster recovery, human rights, racial politics, HIV/AIDS, and more. In this context the AAA and the Network of Concerned Anthropologists addressed the ethical implications of anthropological work for the military. The ideas of public anthropology and of anthropologists as social critics are, therefore, not specifically Scandinavian. Yet, anthropologists in Scandinavia have a long collective record of leaving the ivory tower to address social and political issues such as development aid, the Sámi minority, migration, multiculturalism, and public health. While in some anthropological circles such wider engagement has been viewed with scepticism and fears of simplistic popularization, others have sought to broadcast their ‘making sense of the world' to the public, and have entered policy-making. Paths towards public engagement include the sharing of knowledge with the public and with policy-makers through dialogue and by performing consultancies, interacting with communities, and participating in the media. The overall result has been a remarkable presence in the Scandinavian countries of anthropology and its perspectives in society at large.

This panel will exemplify and discuss the dynamics between public anthropology, policy-making and the development of anthropological theory in Scandinavia. In these countries research is largely funded by the government, and many funding opportunities follow research priorities defined by policy. What are the consequences of this structure for the potential to develop, on the one hand, new theoretical perspectives, and, on the other, the interaction of anthropologists with the public, the media and the policy makers? What consequences may active contributions to policy-making have for the development of the anthropological discipline? Do anthropological research perspectives get too close to governance perspectives, or do the interfaces signify channels for novel theoretical thinking? In the process through which anthropologists cast critical light on supposedly given relations and entities, dynamics emerge between the so-called greater truth value of research expertise and the so-called greater authenticity of marginalized voices. Can social change be facilitated by disrupting or denaturalizing taken-for-granted understandings, not only through academic work, but also through encounters among different knowledges? Whose voices are heard and considered legitimate in research that has political consequences? How can knowledge about ethnic or religious minorities be nuanced without simultaneously reproducing the otherness of such minorities? These are some of the questions that will be explored in this session, from the vantage point of Scandinavia's strong public anthropology.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen (University of Oslo): Changing terms of discourse about immigrants in Norway & the role of anthropology

Gunnar Sørbø (CMI): Bergen – Khartoum, 1963-2014. a History of Institutionalized Collaborative Applied Anthropology and the Continuing Search for Answers to the Sudanese Crisis

Edvard Hviding (University of Bergen): Europe and the Pacific: Engaging Anthropology in EU Policy-Making and Development Cooperation

Tone Bringa (University of Bergen): Anthropology from the Warzone to the Courtroom: Some Critical Reflections on Anthropology and Public
Engangement

Siri Lange (Chr. Michelsen Institute): Partnership, Policy Making and Conditionality in the Gender Field: The Case of Tanzania

Christian Groes-Green (Roskilde University): “Engaged in a Global Sex War”: Navigating Human Rights Activism in Denmark and Mozambique in the Face of a Global Policy Dispute Around Sex Work and Prostitution

Jonathan Friedman (UCSD): Discussant

NATURALIZING DIFFERENCE IN THE TIME OF ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF CONTROL

Session Abstract: In “Naturalizing Power”, Yanagisako and Delaney (1995) brought our attention to how power always is culturally rooted so that variations of power appear as natural, unavoidable or God-given. While they already then emphasized how the “truths” underpinning biological, social or ontological naturalizations of power increasingly were challenged by intensified global circulation of people and ideas, today such global forces have multiplied. Over the last two decades economic liberalization has reconfigured the nature of economy and labor in post-industrial societies, and new technologies of control for population “management”, surveillance and identification of ‘aliens', have been invented and installed in different areas of social life. This has also challenged our understanding of sovereignty and citizenship. In view of these new regimes of labor and technologically advanced surveillance systems we explore the continued relevance of Yanagisako and Delaney's significant effort to examine the (de)naturalization and renaturalisation of power and differences. Can their conceptualizations contribute to our understanding of the social consequences of economic liberalization and new technologies of control?

This panel engages ethnographically and theoretically with (de)naturalization of power and differences and examines various actualizations of the high levels of infrastructural and surveillance powers of the modern state, European Union bodies (i.e. FRONTEX), international organizations, NGOs and other inter- and supranational actors. How are technologies of control legitimated by new and old systems of difference? In which ways are differences in this process simultaneously produced and reproduced? What cultural ideas and systems of value inform laws, regularisations and practices, and on what grounds are these reproduced, legitimated or resisted? For example, how are ideas of the ‘deserving citizen' constructed and in what ways do such constructions become part of producing difference? Or, how is (social) inequality shaped by the naturalization and dehistoricization of categories of difference, such as citizen, migrant, minority, and Muslim? The panel also analyzes the human costs of economic liberalization, through focusing on processes of displacement, dispossession, disorganization, labor regime transition and the production of ‘surplus populations' – processes arguably intrinsically tied to the continuing recreation of (social) inequality in societies around the globe (Kasmir and Carbonella 2008; Ferguson 2013; Murray Li 2010). How do such processes naturalize social inequalities by seemingly transferring them to a domain outside the social and political producing ‘asocial inequality' (see Ferguson 2013:232)? For example, without social proximity, poverty or dependence can easily be configured as caused by inherent individual or racial qualities, or as technical problems with technical solutions. How does such ‘anti-politics' contribute to the (de)naturalizing and renaturalizing of power and differences?

Anette Fagertun (University of Bergen): Denaturalizing Dispossession: The Conversion of Labor and Land in Bali, Indonesia

Ruben Andersson (London School of Economics/Stockholm University): The Making of Migrants at Europe's Borders

Christine M Jacobsen (University of Bergen): ‘Migrant illegality’; Controlling and Navigating Borders in the City of Marseille

Synnove K. N. Bendixsen (University of Bergen): Manifestations of Control on the Irregularized Migrant Body

Sarah S Willen (University of Connecticut): Discussant

Bjorn E. Bertelsen (University of Bergen): Discussant

References

Ferguson, J. 2013. Declarations of dependence: labor, personhood, and welfare in southern Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, pp. 223-242.

Kasmir, S and Carbonella, A. 2008. Dispossession and the Anthropology of Labor. Critique of Anthropology, 28: 1, pp. 5-25.

Murray Li, T 2010. To make live or let die? Rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. Antipode, 41:1, 66-93.

Yanagisako, S. and Delaney, C. (eds.) 1995. Naturalizing Power, Routledge: New York.