Martha Patricia Castañeda Salgado

This VII Latin-American Congress of Anthropology takes place within the framework of certain urgencies that are being imposed in our region. Previous ALA’s congresses focused on possible futures, on worlds in transition, on movements from the South and their emerging challenges. However, these possible futures seem to be crushed by our realities that mark the deepening of inequalities, the growing accumulation of wealth and resources in an increasingly smaller portion of the population and the consequent expropriation of majorities in such process, the resurgence of right-winged movements that despise human and non-human life, and that bring with them the defunding of science and the enthronement of a reactionary and conservative common sense. Science is marked by the neo-liberalization of academia, with increasing bureaucratic pressures that flatten the imagination and emancipatory potential of anthropology. Violence, privileges and inequalities: how do they impact on our anthropologies? What responses are being imagined and deployed within our disciplinary field? What conversations or discussions are we proposing to face this context? What futures are we intending to dispute? These are some of the questions that, articulated within the axes defined as transversal for the congress, we hope will give life to our next meeting.