Felipe Ferreira Gonçalves

The world system of anthropology rests upon a global division of intellectual labor in which scholars based in the Northern and Western hegemonic centers of the discipline typically travel the world to study alterity and produce theory, while most anthropologists elsewhere, in various Souths and Easts, do ‘ethnography at home” and write about nationally-defined locations. To help overcome this hierarchical geopolitics of knowledge, this workshop will discuss practices of ‘transversive anthropologies’ ‘ i.e., those made from the discipline’s peripheries about sites located abroad. Taking seriously both the conceptual importance of ethnographic locations and postcolonial studies’ argument that nationalism replicates colonial forms of power, we are convinced that anthropology can only be decolonized if ‘world anthropologies’ challenge their national missions, engage in serious overseas research, and actually embrace the world. The meeting will convene anthropologists based in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Central Eastern Europe, and the Caribbean who, unlike most of their conational colleagues, research and write about locations outside their nation-states. The main goals of the workshop are: to intensively examine the epistemological, political, and ethical issues involved in transversive anthropologies; to build a shared analytical framework to understand such anthropologies; to prepare a special journal issue on these topics; to establish a long-standing global network of transversive anthropologists; and to encourage the growth and dissemination of transversive anthropologies.