Description:

Susan Carol Rogers

New York University

If 20th century anthropological inquiry rested on encounters with radical unfamiliarity, what is its future in a 21st century world that seems increasingly familiar—marked by spreading sameness, and largely accessible to anyone able to use internet?  And what relationships are possible among the distinctive national traditions comprising “world anthropology”?  This presentation sketches an experiment that aimed to explore these questions by bringing together a small group of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the US for a series of workshops organized around the individual ethnographic research of each.  Standing simultaneously as native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues to each other, we engaged in a kind of reciprocal production of knowledge that stands in clear contrast to the marked alterity that historically distinguished the anthropologist and his audiences from his subjects.  Yielding in turn dazzling insights, dismaying pitfalls, intellectual excitement and logistical nightmares this experience is explored as one path for anthropology’s future that is both promising and challenging.