10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3630
application/pdf
2239-625X
3630
2
en
Francisco Martínez
Anuac
Introduction: Disciplinary cartographies and connectors
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
8
Thematic section: Changing margins and relations within European anthropology
2019-12-29
2019-03-18
2019-12-29
2019-12-29
125-142
1
Francisco Martínez
2019/12/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3630
125
University of Leicester, United Kingdom
2239-625X
2
en
142
Introduction: Disciplinary cartographies and connectors
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/3630/3556
8
                                        2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 125-142




Introduction
Disciplinary cartographies and connectors

Francisco MARTÍNEZ
University of Leicester


ABSTRACT: This special section explores and problematises the disciplinary boundaries
of European anthropology by studying the shifting conditions of our work and changing
centres of gravity in the field. The contributors have been invited to think about what
the concept of “European anthropology” brings actually to the fore, while working in a
context of changing epistemic relations, labour conditions, institutional assessment
and claims to disciplinary validity. This set of papers and commentaries proposes to
approach European anthropology as a specific kind of relation between localities and
practitioners, not an essence. Polemically, we argue that European anthropology does
not exist as a single, easy to define entity precisely because it exceeds its conditions of
possibility and goes beyond geographic relations and separations. Additionally, we pose
as problematic not only the conjunction of the adjective European and the noun anthropology,
but also the separate standing of each of them and what kinds of relations are
established as a result (possession, placing, aspiration, rejection and so on). We
conclude that a key feature characterising European anthropology is its transnational
character – multiplying the relations with what has been traditionally considered non-
anthropological and non-European, and troubling of the boundaries of the discipline.

KEYWORDS: WORLD ANTHORPOLOGIES, RESEARCH        INFRASTRUCTURES,   DISCIPLINARY   BOUNDARIES,
CONNECTORS, EUROPE.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Francisco Martínez
Introduction: Disciplinary cartographies and connectors
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 125-142.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3630
126                                                                      FRANCISCO MARTÍNEZ




European relocations and changing centres of gravity
   It seems to us important to engage with a tension that it is directly
affecting our work: how the community of practitioners defines what counts
as anthropological knowledge within a political and financial context of
which anthropologists may not be responsible for. Also, discussions on what
is actually considered to belong to the European anthropological traditions
and about our relations with what has typically been considered to reside
outside the discipline are more relevant than ever 1. This special section aims
to understand the distinctive shape of European anthropology in the present,
our objects of study, relations and connections, and also the existing inter-
generational discontinuities. In a rather autoethnographic manner, we pay
attention to changing centres of gravity and relations in our field of practice,
given the fact that almost none of the conditions that traditionally led to the
development of the discipline exist anymore. Hence, this means that Europe
has to be positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the
contemporary too.
   Assuming that if nothing else, European anthropology is diverse, we want
to investigate what is meant by diversity, including how Europe itself is
imagined (Macdonald 2015), whether we should search for singularity or
diversity on the continent (Nic Craith 2015), and whether a loss of distinctiveness
should be considered negative per se (Kockel 2010). In this respect, our
research provides a nuanced account of European anthropology at a number
of levels and locations, positing Europe not simply as a nexus of political
concern but also as a problem (Dzenovska 2014). Likewise, we question the
very territorial narrative of European anthropology; this line of thinking is
meant to open up the scale of the transnational field to encompass a global
anthropology, exploring whether European anthropology still exists at the
edges (or shadows) of the anglophone world (Rapport 2002), if those at the
core are losing influence on anthropologies done in the disciplinary
periphery, and also if European anthropology might become a distinctive
branch or sub-system of “world anthropologies” (Restrepo, Escobar 2005;
Lins Ribeiro 2006).

1. I want to express my special thanks for Damián Omar Martínez, who crucially contributed
to improve the whole issue even if he prefers not to be credited as author or editor. Also, my
gratitude to Tomás Sánchez Criado, Adolfo Estalella, Sarah Green, Thomas H. Eriksen and
Čarna Brković for their generous feedback during the editing process, and to the anonymous
reviewers arranged by the journal.


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INTRODUCTION                                                                        127


   We start by proposing that neither Europe nor anthropology should be
regarded as fully integrated coherent wholes, but rather as part of numerous
connections and relations at multiple scales – from small regional branches
to broader world anthropologies 2. Yet even if inspired by the world
anthropologies project of Lins Ribeiro, Restrepo and Escobar, and despite
these matters being related, we do not seek to study issues of systems of
power and hegemony, but rather intend to problematise the disciplinary
boundaries of European anthropology and put the analytic focus on the
actual destabilization of historically constituted traditions. Our specific
contributions to ongoing disciplinary discussions will thus be to address the
emergence of a transnational field of study, which is shaped by national
traditions but not constrained by local practices and institutions. These
increasingly contested epistemic contours and intersections show how
problematic the traditional disciplinary and political boundaries have
become.
   We, therefore, introduce “the connector” as a very productive space for
rethinking the relational space of possibilities that opens between such
combinations (Viveiros de Castro 2003). The connector is itself a form of
intersection, a space in-between, coming to operate between different
worlds, relating and separating simultaneously. In this sense, we aim to
study connectors as channels and also as a materialisation of relations
existing at different scales and through diverse orientations. The
connections that come to mind can include, for instance, doors, bridges,
viaducts, avenues, passages, tunnels, hyphens, trains, languages, maps,
disciplines or even methods. Connectors produce new configurations,
establishing possibilities of crossing, sharing, interacting, seeing and
communicating that in turn affect the parts that they have come into contact
with (see Serres 2006). Connectors are also responsible for the translation of
different positions, enabling in some cases those different parts to find
common ground. Additionally, playing with such conjunctions as “and”,
“in”, “of”, “over” or “upon” might also open up a space to think about how
“anthropology” is related to “Europe” 1) by summing different elements up
towards a transnational project, 2) by locating varied research practices and
devices in order to extend the boundaries of what is possible in the social
sciences, and 3) by establishing relations of belonging that problematise the
very notion of Europe and the role of anthropology while analysing it.

2. We also question the extent to which European anthropology can be considered a
completely integrated whole, or rather, an open system partially overlapping with other
disciplines and regions.

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128                                                           FRANCISCO MARTÍNEZ


   Our concern about the kinds of connectors that anthropologists establish
at different scales is both epistemological and empirical in nature, querying
the ways in which we can still make use of an anthropological and European
“we” once the ethnocentric “we” is no longer an authority on any “them”.
Quite the opposite, the “them” has been found in “us”, and we have already
started to actively study ourselves (Parman 1998; Chua, Mathur 2018),
correcting previously set anthropological agendas, as for instance where and
how the “other” is located (Fabian 1983). This is, thus, a double critique
exercise: that of practices of authority over and within European anthropology
in relation to how valid knowledge in the discipline is defined, who and
where is our public, and what the concept of “European anthropology” brings
actually to the fore.
   Our ideas, collaborations and trajectories might be transnational and
interdisciplinary, but our practices do not necessarily appear as post-
national, post-ethnic or post-tradition. Overall, global processes of re-
identification and re-attachment have made more complex the one-to-one
relationship between place and cultural production (Eriksen 2003). Yet,
anthropology – in itself a field internally fragmented and unfinished – is
being affected not only by global re-articulations, but also – when practiced
in Europe – by the multiple crises reshaping “Europe” as a political project
and as field of study. As pointed out by Laviolette, Green and Martínez in
their commentary, once anthropologists began studying Europeans (the
“provincialising Europe” moment), this generated a big shift in how
anthropology was regarded overall – a transformation not simply due to
global whatsits. Retreating back to the old good times where the subject and
location of study was clear and singular is no alternative, however, neither to
cement the boundaries between the disciplines once the crack appeared.
Hence, Laviolette, Green and Martínez propose to relate the locating
endeavour of European anthropology with novel forms of academic
collaboration and belonging to places.

When the centre cannot hold…
   While this special section aims to be an answer to the aforementioned
disciplinary changes and challenges – offering an analysis of the current
situation of anthropology as it is practiced in different European localities –
some of the reactions that the project is already generating can be seen as
symptoms of a crisis or disagreement in what can be said about
anthropology. For instance, anonymous reviewers labelled us as “Young
Turks”, and our research as “discouraging”. Such a reaction makes evident


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INTRODUCTION                                                                         129


that the project pokes at the “sciatic nerve” of the discipline, and also a
sense of leaving behind a disciplinary regime without having a clear idea of
how the new one is looking like. Interestingly, European anthropology
mirrors many similar tensions between unity and disunity affecting the very
concept of Europe itself. Likewise, we can observe empirically how the
current debates on the conditions of European anthropology are in many
ways no different than the traditional anthropological discussions over
issues of language, inequality, hegemony, otherness, liminality, and so forth,
or the very uncertainties of the European Union as a political project.
   Our research has a strong focus on the contemporary, reflecting on the
European condition of our practice in the present rather than discussing how
anthropology took Europe as its object of enquiry, or the historical relationship
between anthropological theory and its practice in Europe 3. The three
forums dealing with the concept Euro-Anthropology (Green, Laviolette 2015a,
2015b; Martínez 2016) have been a refreshing attempt to tackle these
questions in connection with those of the politics of representation and the
conditions of the diverse anthropologies actually being done within
European academia. We aim, however, to further problematise many aspects
of what has been commented upon and debated in three discussion forums
published by the journal Social Anthropology. The intensity of the debates
reflects what Alessandro Testa (2016) calls “a state of unrest”, a sense of
urgency that needs to be examined and discussed in depth. Drawing on the
momentum generated by the forums, and given the need to develop the brief
accounts into more refined arguments with detailed evidence, we propose an
analysis of the practical supports and conditions of possibility for the
discipline (Green 2014; Strathern 2018), in relation to mobility, locality,
collaborations, epistemic validity and the commodification of knowledge
production.
   This section appears, thus, in a moment where disciplinary relations and
boundaries are being reshaped, redefined and repurposed. For instance, we
observe that European anthropology is being affected by the destabilisation
of what has been historically taken as core and periphery in the discipline,
blurring this separation; in some cases, this influences working conditions
negatively, yet also we see how edges are drawn into the re-arrangement of


3. In the sense of explaining why and how this has happened over time and through
different historical conjunctures. On this matter, see Boissevain 1975; Goddard, Llobera,
Shore 1994; Kockel, Nic Craith, Frykman 2012; Kuper 2015; D.O. Martínez forthcoming.
Moreover, until recently there has not been a European tradition as such, but rather
different schools, such as the British, the French or (arguably) the German schools of
thought.

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the existing canon of anthropological thinking. Participating in these
discussions, Estalella and Sánchez Criado question, in their contribution, the
role of traditions in the current making of European anthropology, providing
a provocative answer: we find ourselves “in the void of tradition”, practicing
anthropology “not as a disciplinary field, but as a field of experimental
collaborations”.
   When analysing the trajectory of this changing (evolving, mutating, in
flux) body of knowledge, we also have to engage with the related criteria of
validity and transmission. Hence, the different contributions explain what it
means to do anthropology nowadays in a European context, foregrounding
the conditions of production for our modes of inquiry, its institutional
backing, questioned or fraught status, and the role that new modes of
management are playing in enabling – or impeding – forms of relevant
anthropological inquiry. Yet, the research also designates a double relational
problem: what is the mutual and recursive relationship between Europe and
anthropology? And how should we reflect upon the connections between the
multiple anthropologies being done in Europe? Rather than offering
accounts of different anthropological “areas” and “national traditions”, we
interrogate the very notions of Europe and anthropology, their connections
at different scales and their changing notions of belonging and what should
be of concern.
   In this vein, Kockel and McFadyen propose to enter into levels below
Europe to show how geographical fields and categories are not definitive, but
moving targets in a constant process of transformation. In their contribution,
they question the very location of centre, particularly in the aftermath of
some events like Brexit, the German reunification, and even Trump’s
presidency, arguing that a “Europeanist anthropology” would be a suitable
response to the emerging tensions and ambivalences (see also Kockel et al.
2012). “It was not meant to be this way”, stresses philosopher Tom Frost
(2017) in an article about Brexit, criticising myths of exceptionalism and also
wrong technocratic decisions by the EU, such as prioritising the single
market, instead of favouring a deeper political and fiscal union.
   Emerging centrifugal forces do also challenge disciplinary ideas about
methods and epistemic evidence, changing, in turn, the centres of gravity of
how anthropology is practiced within European scholarship. The notion of
European anthropology might help us, practitioners, to recover a sense of
purpose and to see ourselves not as flying Dutchmen, moving throughout
Europe without ever integrating ourselves into one particular national
tradition, but as contributing to an epistemologically plural, transnational
discipline able to question its role and its boundaries. Additionally,

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INTRODUCTION                                                                     131


reflecting on European anthropology is for us a way to enable alternative
disciplinary descriptions and epistemic relations to respond to the impact of
the neoliberalisation of academia on our anthropological undertakings.
Hence, this special section not merely accounts for new combinations of the
discipline and the alternative research paradigms being practiced by scholars
based in European institutions, but also tries to formulate resources of hope
and ways of dealing with the present tensions stressing our work. The
selection of articles will eventually demonstrate viable ways to look ahead
under the present conditions, pointing at the directions that will make our
discipline relevant and having an impact beyond academia too.

Biographies and academic trajectories
   Besides studying the actual conditions of knowledge production under
neoliberal educational policies, we intend to illustrate the personal and
professional landscapes of the authors. We will do this by tracking the new
circuits of mobility and transfer of knowledge, contrasting their potential for
generating further transformations within the different localities where the
discipline is practiced. Based on what we found in our practice – an anthropology
that refuses to be pinned down and rather aims at a transnational horizon –
we do not try to isolate our subject of study, but rather to air it out in order
to understand the new conjunctures that lead to shifting connections and
dynamics among anthropological practices. The changes in the field of
practice and in the institution that the discipline has been undergoing in
recent decades have but accelerated (Martínez 2016) with respect to the
methodologies used, the themes being addressed, the labour conditions of
the practitioners (i.e. the emergence of rapid assessment techniques and
short-term ethnography), and the crystallisation of new kinds of location
and networks of collaboration, characterised, to a great extent, by the need
to defend our time to settle and also to think (di Puppo 2016; Jiménez
Sedano 2016).
   In this set of articles and commentaries, many of the contributions engage
with discussions about anthropology’s own status as it emerges in different
European localities (in some cases outside of academic settings). We also
account for new ways of collaboration within and beyond academic
disciplines by exploring how new knowledge relations are playing out within,
across and beyond anthropology (see Kockcel, McFadyen in this journal).
The transformations described indicate a shift in the relations between
ethnography and what is considered an anthropological mode of inquiry, an
epistemic partnership, and also authority, establishing a more dialogic form
of knowledge production (Holmes, Marcus 2005; Estalella, Sánchez Criado

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2018). There is likewise a shift – yet of a different kind – between anthropology
and its proximity to life, a changing distance characterised by two factors: on
the one hand, the amount of time that we dedicate to administrative tasks
and to being in front of a laptop; on the other hand, the sense of sacrifice of
our personal lives that many of us experience – distancing scholarship from
life as a result.
   A new generation of anthropologists based in Europe (yet trained in
different parts of the world) are showing a more open sensitivity to dialogic
forms of research and conceptual tools, bringing with them a new
anthropological programme that problematises classical epistemic
boundaries. In their contribution to this special section, Estalella and
Sánchez Criado put the emphasis on reconsidering the boundaries of
anthropology, thereby raising two important questions: Where does
anthropological knowledge production take place? And, who is excluded
when tracing epistemic frontiers? To answer these questions, we need to pay
attention to “the social and cultural located-ness of both knowledge and
knowers” (Ferguson 2012: 206). Being part of an inclusive abstraction such
us European anthropology might allow us to cross actual disciplinary borders
without a visa, troubling anthropology’s boundaries as a response to
reactionary efforts to police them (see Clarke 2014; also Estalella, Sánchez
Criado in this issue).
   All these assumptions rely on increasingly complex forms of relating and
on the coexistence of different niches of practice, showing that European
anthropology is increasingly being practiced through a transnational
network of sites. These different niches of practice interact in multiple ways
within the global circulation of ideas, in some cases merging and in other
cases not even adding up. Along these lines, we emphasise that European
anthropology is not being destroyed, but rather is in the middle of a process
of reconfiguration (of concepts, methods and cultural areas, of the divide
between us and the other and between objects and subjects), and of
dispersion (being currently multiplied through novel relations and
connectors, changing along historically constituted traditions and centre-
periphery relations). This was also pointed out by James Ferguson in
“Novelty and method: Reflections on global fieldwork” (2012: 196).
Specifically, he listed four elements that make things different from how our
discipline was practiced in the past:
   – The fact that social relations are increasingly being stretched across a
transnational space;
   – The great proliferation of transnational institutions of a new kind;



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INTRODUCTION                                                                           133


   – The acceleration of many social, political and economic processes;
   – The rapidly increasing number of highly educated professionals and
amount of information available.
   We talk about knowledge territories as a way to problematise them.
Overall, space functions as a key organising principle in anthropology, being
simultaneously a product of social structures and relations (Gupta, Ferguson
1997). Geopolitical metaphors have also been used to explain and justify the
need for different disciplines, with terms such as boundaries, kingdoms or
even federations coming into play (see Papataxiarchis 2015). However, the
emergence of European anthropology is not simply about the distorting of
disciplinary boundaries, and cartographies, but also about producing a
change of scale, displacing and dispersing the idea of Europe along with it
(see Čapo’s commentary); and affecting on European imagination and
anthropology’s public futures, including discussions about epistemic
experimentation, socioeconomic inequalities, and cosmopolitanism (see
Eriksen; Estalella, Sánchez Criado; and Rapport in this issue).

Academic capitalism
   This special section, originally meant to foster an intergenerational and
international debate, also engage with such questions as: What is the
relevance of this object called an academic discipline? Where is the public of
European anthropology located? And, what is our role as anthropologists in
Europe? It is the community of anthropology practitioners who defines what
counts as knowledge, and it is that definition which in turn redefines the
discipline, argues Marilyn Strathern (2000; 2007). The first auditors of our
work are ourselves, the community of practitioners, she insists. As Strathern
foregrounds elsewhere, “the value of a discipline is precisely in its ability to
account for its conditions of existence and thus […] how it arrives at its
knowledge practices” (2004: 5)4. Also, along this line Johannes Fabian points
out that the definition of knowledge affects all phases of our work, arguing
that “knowing what and how we know is a practical, not just a theoretical,
problem” (2012: 439).
   However, quantitative indicators have come to signify anthropological
quality. Likewise, the discipline has been further integrated into the
knowledge economy, influencing the labour conditions and the regimes of
value overall, as we are impelled to look at ourselves as a competitive brand
4. Also, Strathern (2006) has noted that disciplinary awareness can be directly linked with
the protection of academic autonomy, especially when discourses of interdisciplinarity are
used as new procedures for auditing, and in many cases, as a criterion of accountability
itself (Barry et al. 2008).

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since the scientific community is increasingly portrayed through the rhetoric
of the market (Brenneis 2009; Pobłocki 2009; Shore, MacLauchlan 2012;
Heatherington, Zerilli 2016; Savransky 2016; Shore, Trnka 2013; Shore,
Wright 2015). Family life, childcare, social relations and ties to our locations
are threatened by actual measurement-addicted strategies in universities.
The pressures of working in academia are harder, as the universities are
increasingly squeezed; scholars are expected to carry more tasks in less time
and more and more involved in short-term projects. To many of us, this
makes us reconsider if pursuing an academic career is healthy and worthy,
frequently thinking of possible ways out; yet, it also makes the whole
scholarly system less sustainable in a long term.
    Universities’ priorities have changed and seem to be, by this order, attracting
third-party funding, feeding the administrative machinery, cooperating with
the marketing department, pleasing the publishing industry, being creative
and innovative, and finally, striving for a strong performance in the
international market, giving, as a result, no time to engagement in greater
society (Eriksen 2006). In an article entitled “I wanted to be an academic, not
“a creative”: Notes on universities and the new capitalism” (2008), Eeva
Berglund criticises how we attribute value to different kinds of work done in
the university. As she points out, the institutionally produced environment
of rivalry, the fatigue of being burdened by redundant administrative
information and the increasing tendency to work according to short-term
contracts is producing more difficult working conditions. Additionally, what
is put in the hands of this bureaucratic leviathan is the power to reshape the
criteria of validity and the regime of value governing anthropological
knowledge, increasingly eclipsing traditional scholarly notions of both value
and validity (Barth 2002).
    What we see, however, is that anthropology has retreated and shrunk
away from the public sphere, becoming harmless and unimportant. For our
discipline to count politically and influence public debates, it has to reach
audiences outside academia. And the best manner we have is to tell stories
and write more personally engaged ethnographies. “Stories are the stuff of
life; analysis is for specialists” (2006: 35), observes Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
Also, the questions of precarity, the consequences of austerity policies and
the need to spend increasing proportions of our time in efforts to secure
funding have emerged as two of the fundamental topics in the discussions
about anthropology in Europe and beyond. The university is increasingly
being experienced as a (demanding) institution and less and less as a place
(for investigation and knowledge making). One task of European anthropology
is thus to contribute to re-imagining universities within the global knowledge
economy, to regaining the capacity to define what should be valued and to

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INTRODUCTION                                                                   135


designing our own measuring instruments. On this regard, Regina Bendix,
Kilian Bizer and Dorothy Noyes note how the demands of the project writing
process force qualitative researchers into a position of “translating their
idiom, distorting their paradigms, and misrepresenting the logic of their
procedures” to align with the requisites of the funding agencies (2017: 7),
placing the question of how to measure qualitative outputs at the centre of
the discussion.

European research infrastructures
   Assuming the importance of recognising the multiple political and
economic strategies and scales at play in European anthropology, this
special section places itself as part of the new transnational approaches to
the study of the epistemic organisational forms and politics of knowledge
production (Corsín Jiménez 2008). We aim to discuss the ways the European
economic and political project and the field of European anthropology
mutually constitute one another, having an impact in Europe making, and in
how our work is practised, recognised and legitimated as a relevant
discipline. Europe-making and knowledge-making go hand to hand, co-
relating politics, research infrastructures and the practice of anthropology.
Indeed, the EU has been discursively representing itself through buzzwords
that have an impact in our work and considerations of what is knowledge –
buzzwords that have been symptomatically changing over the years: from
“knowledge society” we have passed to “knowledge economy”, and more
recently, we have started to hear terms such as “innovation union” used to
characterise Europe (Felt 2016). Europeanisation is more than just a
transnational process of mobility and circulation and competing conceptions
of integration. Europeanisation also brings to the fore the creation of
specific discourses, standards, systems of valuation and research funding
and infrastructures.
   Ongoing processes of Europeanisation are part of a changing system of
relationships between people and institutions, generating new forms of
abstraction, valuation, sense of scale and socio-technical arrangements. For
instance, one of the most important results has been the ERC programmes,
which have become key to the development of scientific research projects in
Europe (Miller 2015). Another relevant trans-national institution that has
had consequences for European anthropology is the EASA (European
Association of Social Anthropologists), serving as it does as a microcosm of
Europe and producing a great variety of transnational impulses. As Damián
Omar Martínez (2016) has noted, the EASA has helped us to challenge
“methodological nationalism” (Wimmer, Glick Schiller 2002) and to craft


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136                                                           FRANCISCO MARTÍNEZ


European anthropology as a field of practice – one which remains,
nonetheless, located in and attached to particular places and in dialogue
with different traditions (considered themselves not as something static, but
a flowing stream).
   In an evolving socio-political construction such as the current
Europeanisation process, there are openings and closures. In other words,
“some things and ideas travel, while others don’t” (Eriksen 2003: 11). Also, if
musing about the specific ways in which anthropological practices underpin
or are induced by the making of the EU, and the ways in which notions of
European identity have contributed to the establishment of our transnational
field of practice, we should critically examine and problematise the way the
EU is empirically portrayed in the twenty-first century. For instance, Jürgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003) remark that the EU represents a
historical break with the past through the creation of “new, supranational
forms of cooperation”. Also, for Juan Diez Medrano (2003), Europeanisation
implies the emergence of transnational groups of citizens across borders
whose practices transcend their locality or national affiliations. For Andrew
Barry (2006), however, Europeanisation refers to the formation of new
spaces of government as well as a “technological zone” of common
standards. Likewise, John Borneman and Nick Fowler (1997) together with
Robert Harmsen and Thomas Wilson (2000) foreground the idea that
Europeanisation means new forms of governance and reorganising
territoriality, peoplehood and means of power.

Concluding remarks
   This special section is not merely an assessment or an overview of the
state of anthropology in Europe, but a call to see what sort of transnational
(European) anthropological practices exist already and to imagine what sort
of transnational, “Euro-anthropology” is worth striving towards.
Contributors were selected because of being active in different transnational
anthropological communities and/or networks. We do not pretend to
represent the state of anthropology in Europe, but rather to offer a reflection
about the kind of experiments, formats and relations through which
European anthropology is emerging towards the future as an intellectual and
political project. Dealing with the topic of European Anthropology is also a
problematisation of Europe and anthropology, a mutual and recursive
relationship that also brings to the fore the kind of knowledge we represent
and the relationship of Europe and our discipline to something that has been
named as “world anthropologies”, revealing a larger concern on what is
deemed relevant in our anthropological inquiry (see Estalella, Sánchez Criado).


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INTRODUCTION                                                                     137


   This set of papers and commentaries explores to what extent the shifting
conditions of our work and multiple engagements of anthropology with
other epistemological paradigms have contributed to the destabilisation of
anthropology’s disciplinary identity at a broader level. It has to do, therefore,
with the configuration and description of the discipline we offer and the
future we imagine, making a point about how our knowledge relations are
located as a field and the way they reveal something about the character of
our discipline and of the (transnational) European project. Against the
opinion of some our reviewers, this does not devaluate either Europe or
anthropology; rather, it offers new ways of valuing (un updating) them both.
Moreover, it was not our intention to engage in a corporatist proselytism of
the discipline, providing some kind of advertising brochure to attract new
anthropologists, but to question the contemporary conditions of production
of anthropological knowledge, and to reflect, critically, on what modes of
inquiry our positioning as European anthropologists eventually open up or
curtail. The concept of “European anthropology” can be, therefore, approached
as an abstraction that connects, a conceptor, whereby the emphasis is put on
the capacities and possibilities opened up via this epistemic and political
location.
   One of the things we learnt is that Europe is composed of a variety of
peripheries, which in some cases provide strong critiques and creative
alternatives in political and disciplinary terms (see Martínez in this issue).
Another empirical observation is that, after being historically confronted by
differences, the anthropology done in Europe is increasingly turning the
disciplinary legacy of a critical ethnographic eye back onto Europe. The
space of European anthropology is changing precisely because of the
implications that academic precarity has for knowledge production itself;
but it is also changing because of the growing importance of the EU for
anthropological research – despite appearing as an unfinished and at times
dysfunctional political assemblage. Secondly, the relationship of European
anthropology to world anthropologies is shifting, becoming more integrative
and symmetrical, and making the twentieth century disciplinary
cartographies look rather obsolete. Thirdly, as in the case of the European
project, anthropology is embedded in global politics and neoliberal
knowledge-making dispositions, hence the relevance of the kind of
knowledge that we represent in a world dominated by marketisation and
standardisation is also changing. Fourthly, based on a collective sense of
disciplinary disarray, some colleagues began to approach the idea of
European anthropology as a future-oriented project in-the-making (see
Čapo, Rapport and Eriksen in this special section), composed of multiple


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138                                                           FRANCISCO MARTÍNEZ


transnational practices and of a set of humanist values worth striving towards.
We conclude that a key feature characterising European anthropology is the
very troubling of the boundaries of the discipline – by multiplying the
relations with what has been traditionally considered non-anthropological
and non-European.
   Accordingly, we will engage with such empirical and theoretical questions
as: What are the boundaries of European anthropology as a field of practice?
What kinds of relationships are established, and what is the role of academic
networks within them? How are these connections embodied and
articulated? To what degree the emergence of a European field of practice is
weakening (or not) national identities and traditions? In what way does
engaging with the current disarray of the discipline contribute to rethinking
the actual crisis of the EU? What role do the social and material conditions
play in the production of anthropological knowledge in that positionality
(namely, labour environments, temporal regimes, pressures and
reconciliations of work and family life, mechanisms of training, hiring and
promotion, canons and notions of relevance)? And finally, how do we know
what we are?




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INTRODUCTION                                                                       139


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 Francisco MARTÍNEZ is a Lecturer in the School of Museum Studies, University of
 Leicester. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European
 Association of Social Anthropologists. Francisco has been a postdoctoral
 researcher at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. Currently, he is the
 co-editor of the Berghahn book series “Politics of Repair” and member of the
 editorial board of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. Francisco has
 edited several books – including Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic
 Responses (Berghahn, 2019) and is the author of Remains of the Soviet Past in
 Estonia (UCL Press, 2018).
 fm211@leicester.ac.uk




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Francisco Martínez
Introduction: Disciplinary cartographies and connectors
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 125-142.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3630
