A New Anthropology Curriculum, Designed for the Future
10 - Anthropology Beyond the Academy
For the final section of the subject, we will reflect upon anthropology’s past, and look towards its future. The next two weeks will entail a critical analysis of the discipline, exploring the arguments against its very existence, and what needs to happen for it to survive.
This week we consider the problematic history of anthropology, and the impact that this legacy has on its existence today. With a focus on the structural barriers of the Academic system, and the involvement of anthropology in the colonial project, we turn our gaze inwards, to consider the implications of the roots of our knowledge. The previous weeks have illustrated the ways that Anthropology can exist outside of an academic setting. This week we consider the darkest aspects of the University context, and question where it is exactly that student anthropologists should be heading, if anywhere at all.
The assigned readings each provide strong critiques of Anthropology as it exists today. Alongside these, have a listen to the short audio podcast with discussion from key academics in the field, and their comments in defence of the discipline.
Students are expected to engage with these current and pressing debates within and surrounding anthropology and bring to class their own ideas around whether there is merit to the continuation of the discipline, and if so, what that continuation should look like.
In preparation for this week’s tutorial, please bring along an example of an alternative learning space to the University to share with the class.
Tutorial Questions
What aspects of anthropology can you identify that conform to the colonial structures that has informed the discipline?
Why are these aspects issues to anthropology and impede it from reaching its potential?
What needs to happen to 'decolonize' anthropology?
How can we, as student researchers, endeavour to bring these ideas into our own work and our own practice?
Required
Click to Download
Grande, S 2018, ‘Refusing the university’, in E Tuck and KW Yang (eds), Toward what justice?, Routledge, New York, pp. 47–65. doi: 10.4324/9781351240932-4.
Jobson, RC 2020 ‘The case for letting anthropology burn: Sociocultural anthropology in 2019’, American Anthropologist, vol. 122, no. 2, pp. 259–271. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398.
Todd, Z 2016, ‘“Ontology” is just another word for colonialism: An Indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 4–22, accessed June 12 2021, doi: 10.1111/johs.12124.
Recommended
Brodkin, K, Morgen, S & Hutchinson, J 2011, ‘Anthropology as white public space?’, American Anthropologist, vol. 113, no.4, pp. 545–556. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01368.x.
Pandian, A 2018, 'Open Access, Open Minds', Fieldsights, accessed June 12 2021, <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/open-access-open-minds>.
Said, EW 1989, ‘Representing the colonized: Anthropology’s interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 205–225.
Todd, Z 2018, 'The decolonial turn 2.0: The reckoning', anthro{dendum}, accessed June 12 2021, <https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/ >.
Tuck, E & Yang, KW 2012, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, vol. 1, no. 1, accessed June 12 2021, <https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630>.
Emily Wood Trounce
An activist and academic interested in notions of relationality with the natural world, I’m exploring the way ideas of ‘speaking’ with and for nature intersect with hegemonic structures of environmental management. My thesis considers Australia’s first state-created environmental advocacy body, tasked with representing the ‘voice’ of a river. This work is heavily indebted to the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, on whose unceded sovereign lands I live and write.