Rethinking anthropological categories for understanding Europe

Abstract (English)

Anthropology has been much criticized from within and outside the discipline for its Eurocentric and colonial past. Anthropological concepts are routinely found to be rooted in Eurocentric assumptions. This critique cuts to the very foundations of the discipline, namely its scientific approach and its comparative method. In other words, anthropology has been subject to relentless critique, on occasion raising the question of whether it is possible or worthwhile to engage in anthropological research at all. And yet, a view from outside and thinking across differences has remained a landmark analytical tool in anthropology. In this aspect European societies, including their ways of producing knowledge, remain understudied: they have rarely (if ever) enjoyed the analytical benefits of a distanced perspective. Most of the time, European societies tend to be analyzed either as centres of modernity to be deconstructed with the help of home-grown critical theory or as “home” by minority scholars–for example, from Eastern Europe–using the tools that might be rooted through a non-European trajectory, but are ultimately subordinated to it (for example, postcolonial theory).

If scholars from other parts of the world venture to study Europe, they too use the concepts of the natives (that is, Europeans), but don't necessarily distance from them via a non-Western perspective. We believe that such a hegemonic approach, whereby both analytical concepts and their critiques start and end in Europe–or the West more broadly–impoverishes anthropology in general and European/American ethnography in particular, curtails non-euro-centric theoretical developments, and hinders the world-wide decolonization efforts underway.

In this panel, we invite authors to present papers that distance themselves from (or even discard with) the Euro-centric theoretical and analytical perspectives. We welcome attempts at studying Europe from a radically distanced perspective (which might come also from minority traditions inside Europe or the West). The intention here is to free the imagination and think about how anthropology might be practiced if it were less rooted in European/Western tradition and perspective as it has been.