Positioning Anthropology in the Reordering of the World

Roundtable organised by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna and the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

The global situation evidently has entered a period of rapid changes and vaccelerating crises. Some maintain that this is nothing particularly unusual, but merely a grave intensification of all those contradictions and turmoils which global economies and societies have been nourishing and advancing already for many decades. Others, by contrast, insist that the present demarcates the watershed into a period without precedence. Despite such significant differences in assessment and theorizing, most social scientists tend to agree that a situation of multiple crises poses unknown challenges to researchers and to the canons and geographies of knowledge production. What are the adequate conceptual and methodological tools to address, analyze and theorize a polyvalent escalation of crises, combining upheavals in main environmental and climatic fields with disastrous developments in energy and food supplies, living costs, and the dissemination of military dangers and aggressions globally? What are the particular challenges to anthropology?

Two senior researchers from Vienna's leading institutes in socio-cultural anthropology

Ayse Caglar (IKSA, University of Vienna) & Andre Gingrich (ISA, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

welcome and host a round table discussion by a group of distinguished anthropologists:

Ulf Hannerz (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)

Shalini Randeria (Central European University)

Purnima Mankekar (UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles)

Helena Wulff (Stockholm University)