Plural or indigenous? Challenges to mainstream anthropology in the 1970s.

Abstract (English)

The past years there has been an increasing interest for the decolonization of social science and of knowledge in relation to research and higher education. It is, however, forgotten that already during the 1970’s, ideas of indigenous anthropology and critical perspectives on a Westernized anthropology that had not only had contextualized the Global South as the object of study and the Global North as the context of knowledge production but also had both standardized and capitalized academic structures, the management of reference production and the right to knowledge. The early examples of critical articulations of de facto “indigenous anthropology” and other disciplines within the social sciences are multiple, in Latin America, in India, Japan, China etc. Not seldom raised in relation to protests and understandings of the rests of the after match of colonial rule.

Although epistemic injustice and Western academic hegemony have been constantly intensifying, the history of anthropology is far more heterogeneous than what generally is being presented. In this paper we aim to explore and discuss two parallel processes within anthropology during the Cold war period with a particular focus on the 1970. The first is the search for internationalization and for a shared anthropology, mostly guided by Sol Tax and Cyril S. Belshaw; the second is related to the claims for the indigenization of anthropology. We are specifically interested in how these two different forms of expressions aimed at challenging the discipline with a more universal shared anthropology as well as a more particular anthropology. The context of this period is marked by the Cold war but also by the political importance of the so-called "Third World" against the backdrop of important developments of the, in particular, American, academic structures such as the expansion and formation of higher education and restructuring of funding of research.