Next Forum

In the sixty-fourth number of Antropologicheskij forum / Forum for Anthropology and Culture, published by the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Kunstkamera), the European University at St Petersburg, the topic of discussion will be anthropological theories. We would like to invite you to respond to the questionnaire below.

You may, as you wish, directly address the questions presented here, or send in a text responding to one or some of them (or taking up some other issue that seems to you relevant). Whichever way, we would be grateful if you could keep your answers to a maximum of 10 pp. (1.5 spaced, 12-point type). Please use the author-date in-text citation system for any references in the format [Smith 2002: 12], i.e. author/date (no comma) in square brackets, appending a list of ‘References’ at the end with full publication details: Author: e.g. Smith M. A.; Article title: e.g. ‘Visual Anthropology’; Journal title: e.g. Ethnology, 2002, no. 3, pp. 14–19; or alternatively, Author: e.g. Smith M. A.; Book title: e.g. Visual Anthropology. Place: Publisher, date, pages: e.g. London: Anvil Press, 2002, 356 pp. Please send replies by 15 January 2025 to forum.for.anthropology@gmail.com, with a copy to ck616@cam.ac.uk; your email address should be included in any attached file. We hope that the discussion will appear in March 2025.

Forum 64: Anthropological Theories for the Twenty-First Century: A Road Map

Over the past half-century or more, our concepts of academic theories (and their relations with facts) have gone through a number of transformations. Added to this, in the natural sciences, the vectors of these transformations have run in precisely the opposite direction from those in the social sciences and humanities. In this regard, anthropology, as a discipline rooted simultaneously in the natural sciences (evolutionary anthropology, bioanthropology), in the social sciences and in the humanities (cultural anthropology and the ethnographical study of folklore), has ended up in a fissured state, as indeed is true of the human sciences overall. The twenty-first century looks to become an age of integration and cross-disciplinary synthesis.

Reflections upon the outcome of all this for anthropology have, it would appear, espoused two different directions. One relates to the degree of inter-corporative integration: the extent to which it is possible to observe, or remark, corporate interests that are shared by representations of different anthropological sub-disciplines (for instance, evolutionary and legal anthropology), and the question of whether anthropologists in general fell the need for a universal theory. Another area of discussion relates to the character of exchanges of theory between anthropology and other areas of knowledge, the intensity and productivity of theoretical borrowings from adjacent or distant fields, and the possibility (or not) of evolving a ‘big theory’. All these problems, it would appear, have a universal character, but the Russian case appears particularly interesting, given the obligatory nature of engagement with Marxism back in the Soviet period and then the reversal of this situation from 1991 onwards.

In the development of science and scholarship, it is customary to distinguish internal factors (the logic of how knowledge evolves) from external factors (political, ideological, social, material etc.) Of all the disciplines, anthropology is least inclined to develop in ‘laboratory’ style – in a social and political vacuum. It would be interesting to read reflections on which social and natural forces (ranging from decolonisation and feminism to climate change) have recently had most impact on anthropological theory.

In the current ‘Forum’, we have decided to devote attention to the question of ethnologists’ and anthropologists’ attitude to theoretical knowledge, to establish the theoretical preferences (assuming such exist and are consciously recognised) that characterise researchers in the field, to discuss the current state of anthropological theory, and to collect expert forecasts about patterns of growth and development in different areas and subfields of the discipline.

We would like to invite participants in the ‘Forum’ to answer the following questions:

1. At present, cultural and social anthropology includes a range of different directions: medical, economic, political anthropology, and so forth. Is a unifying ‘big theory’ desirable, or not?

2. The discussion that we held in the inaugural number of AF (No. 1, 2004) contended that a shift ‘from theory to description’ could be observed. What would you say are the main changes (if any) that have affected attitudes to theory since then?

3. In which anthropological sub-fields (directions, research areas) is theory developing in the most interesting way? Which theoretical approaches strike you as the most productive?

4. Which types of theory do you yourself use? ‘Big’ ones, ‘local’ ones, or ones of your own creation?

5. What explains the ‘longevity’ of some theories and the rapid disappearance from the scene of others?

Editorial Office of the journal 'Forum for Anthropology and Culture':

Forum for Anthropology and Culture:

ISSN 1815-8927

Antropologicheskij forum:

ISSN 1815-8870

EUROPEAN HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE