National Seminar "In an Uncertain World: Anthropology and Anthropologists

Department of Anthropology, on 27.02.2024

The Department of Anthropology in Collaboration with IQAC of the college has organised a one-day National Seminar on "In an Uncertain World: Anthropology and Anthropologists" at Dr APJ. Abdul Kalam Government College. The main speaker was Prof. Subhadra Mitra Channa, Retired Professor, Department of Anthropology, Delhi University.

The concept note is as follows:

In and Uncertain World: Anthropology and Anthropologists

One of the major aspects of the disciplinary self-reflexivity of anthropology is that it often stops, reflects back, criticises and progresses. Anthropologists often note an existence of disciplinary crisis and strive for the future. We can think of the death and revival of urban anthropology with spatial turn or publication of “Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography” by James Clifford and George E. Marcus as one of such moments. IT and AI revolutions, 2020 global pandemic and increasing restless post-cold war world systems have created another moment of such self-reflection.

Like every discipline, anthropology embraces a few essential themes which include a perennial mistrust towards the generalisations and the questions of positions. Theoretically speaking, anthropologists need to relook at three key aspects of the discipline, viz. scepticism, empathy (or at least openness), and holism. It is the scepticism towards the totalizing and grand generalizations, especially the taken-for-granted and/or dominant regimes that often defines what anthropology does in practice. It calls for a relook at the subtleties of everyday life that escapes most of the a priori deductive theoretical schemes and methods such as an option-based questionnaire. Such scepticism in part results in care for the ignored and marginalised people’s point of view through empathy and finally the recognition that world is an inter-connected hole. We look for the possibilities of an amalgamation of the three to provide options to beat or at least blow the establishment, so as to make anthropology work as a weapon to give voice to the powerless. In consequence it can become a counterexample to the expansions of the natural sciences. As one looks at the contemporary world one begins to understand that there are immense possibilities to use this amalgamation to address the contemporary issues and work for the future world.

Keeping the disciplinary understanding of people’s everyday life in its changing terrain, perhaps the best way to describe the contemporary world is to consider it as uncertain and liquid. Services, industries, jobs and everyday security concerns have become increasingly uncertain, transboundary and liquid. Human beings in todays’ world are adapting to an increasing uncertainty simultaneously in both the positive and negative senses. We have witnessed several revolutionary changes in telecommunication and Information Technology and of late in the virtual world with introduction of ever more powerful Artificial Intelligence tools. The certainty with which people little more than one decade ago went to sleep include their earning patterns, their life course and choices and the future of their family and friends. The traditional concept of family, neighbourhood, friendship and kinship relations were also more or less certain. Today, one is uncertain even about his/her tomorrow. A person schooling at Kolkata might just go to Singapore to study his/her +2 and end up joining a MNC with global posting and remain restless for the rest of his/her life. While just his friend might end up doing nothing dreadfully dependent on state’s aids to survive. Co-evolving with economic and spatial uncertainty, our relationships, leisure, politics and identity all are undergoing massive alterations. Can we, the anthropologists equipped enough to study human beings in an uncertain world? Can we the anthropologists adapt and change according to the fast changing landscape of uncertainty? The seminar, is a preliminary preparation to embrace this uncertainty which is going to be the characteristic of our time.

Professor Channa mapped the issues of uncertainty by situating it in four major domains:

1. the question of marginal population who are living in an uncertain world for centuries now. Which in a way questions the urban and well off section of the population which finds uncertainty in recent time because of compulsory mobility of their time.

2. The question of focusing on post cold war world orders where people have become concerned for the fate of Ukrainians, or for that matter Gaza, but she questions the fact that we cannot really forget people in Africa, or for that matter the whole continents which were subjected to colonial expansions which resulted in killing of millions.

3. The issues of everyday marginalisation of people which is continuing even today.

4. Finally she argued for the disciplinary issues of anthropology.

Following are a few moments of the preparation by our students for the seminar also of the seminar venue.