OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

ADVOCACY: Public engagement around issues at the centre of one’s research, or in support of persons or groups at the focus of one’s collaborative research; responsible research; reciprocity and collaboration.

COLLABORATION, ACCOUNTABILITY, RECIPROCITY: making anthropology a public good, and not the preserve of professional cliques alone.

COLONIALISM/IMPERIALISM: Critiques of world capitalism; critiques of anthropology’s multi-layered interpenetrations with colonialism.

COMPLEXITY/CHAOS: Not “the problem of order” all over again, but newer ways of understanding dynamism and transformation.

CONCEPTS: Building better building blocks for the ways we perceive and understand the world.

CYBERSPACE & ethnography: new arenas, new methods, new phenomena, new conversations.

DECOLONIZATION: critique of the fundamentally colonial structure of the anthropological discipline, taking us well beyond the discussion of easy and obvious targets of discussion such as ethics and whatever institutional relationships.

ETHNOGRAPHY: experimental forms of ethnographic research and expression.

INTRODUCTION: materials for opening the project.

LIBERATION: a critique of ongoing imperialism and capitalism.

NEW SUBJECT POSITIONS? How are persons reconfiguring their identity positions in ways that render received notions and political positions unworkable?

OPEN ACCESS/OPEN SOURCE: “open access” in its diverse forms, related to making “published” knowledge as freely and widely available as possible.

POST-COLONIALISM: Readings and ideas from the “post-colonial” literature with an openness to prospects for transforming anthropological theory and practice.

RESTRUCTURING KNOWLEDGE: beyond inter- or multi-disciplinariness.

RESURGENCE: against the “salvage mode” of ethnography, against “evolutionisms,” against extinctionist ideologies of the (neo)liberal and Eurocentric kind. An openness to resurgent indigeneities and to ideologies against the state.

THE LEANING IVORY TOWER OF ACADEMIA: Critical analyses of the active and sublimated political stances that have become the norm of regular academic life; the inherent politics of “professionalism”; forces against positive social and political change within the academic setting.

UTOPISTICS: Following Wallerstein and Nandy, an attempt to envisage the alternate futures that one can work to achieve.