Sergio Daniel Lopez

Building on the success of its first edition, the 2nd AIBR International Conference of Anthropology brings anthropologists from many different parts of the world under the theme ‘Identity: Bridges, Thresholds, and Barriers.’ Since the beginnings of our discipline, we have reflected upon the categories, the continuities and discontinuities of being human. Therefore, to what extent are we ‘inventing’ identity? If we have traditionally drawn a line between identity and alterity, have these essential concepts not served to be the discipline’s very barriers? At one level, thinking about who we are requires to discriminate, to define and to separate. At another level it requires to incorporate, to relate, to entangle. These are the vectors by which the idea of identity is ‘good to think’ and to be thought about, to discuss, and to provoke the anthropological debate that we will engage in at this conference. In the 2nd AIBR International Conference of Anthropology we build on the experience of our first edition, which was held in the city of Madrid (Spain), in July 2015. It hosted a total of 832 delegates who participated in 140 panels. The high turnout in Madrid and the positive feedback that we received from the conference participants shows that there is a need to convene an annual meeting within the context of Ibero-American anthropology (Spain, Portugal, and Latin America). The second edition of this conference will be jointly organized by AIBR (Network of Iberoamerican Anthropologists) and GRECS (Research Group on Control and Social Exclusion, University of Barcelona) during 6-7 September 2015 in the beautiful city of Barcelona (Spain). The theme for this year ‘Identity: Bridges, Thresholds, and Barriers’ welcomes a large number of proposals and anthropologists from all sub-fields of the discipline. The conference aims to create a space that combines traditional forms of dissemination of knowledge–papers, posters, keynote addresses–with a wide variety of formats to inspire discussion and debate–round tables, documentary films, and book presentations.