EASA2020: Opening and keynote address
Channel: NomadIT
Date: 2020-08-21

Keynote: Terms of Engagement by Marilyn Strathern

Anthropology is nothing if it is not a particular way of describing the world. Yet what is most precious to it -- the terms and concepts that mark it as a discipline -- can also be the most tricky. When resurgent boundaries and exclusions twist truth-telling and faking in any which way, anthropology might find a new urgency in thinking about the conceptual life it tries to express. How it engages has always depended on (attention to) how terms are used, something shared with those who people its subject matter. Today critical attention has never been more important. An exploration into the colourings and resonances of diverse verbal usages, old and new, points to moments where language works both with us and against us. Indeed supports for xenophobia and the like may be embedded where least expected. Out of it all, the lecture imagines a future for anthropological exposition. There could be no better place to start than in EASA’s many-languaged company.

Note: Credit for the Coimbra conference (31/08/1990) image, Photographer: Marçalo (from the archive of Gheorghiță Geană).