Reception of the site> meetings> on 2007> anthropology facing its objects : new ethnographic contexts
Anthropology facing its objects : new ethnographic contexts
International Symposium : January 24th, 25th and 26th, 2007
University of Provence, Campus Saint-Charles in Marseilles
International Symposium of anthropology co-organised by Donatecarcenter.com-AIX
The history of anthropology is scanned by debates of épistémologique nature and methodological on the conditions of deployment of its look : the practices of the ground, the devices of analysis, the procedures of restitution are then questioned (application, writing) and reports in political authorities (local powers, limited partners). This necessary reflexive worry in the step of the anthropologist must be revalued at present by the yardstick of a series of transformations to which anthropology turns its attention. Among these, they will mention :
- the multiplication of controversial situations (self-defining tensions in the reports of force opened between political groups or social, conflicts between generations in deteriorations of relations « of type ») ;
- the multiform expressions of the "transnationalization" of religions, cultural codes and of savings ;
- references visited again to past - that it is about colonisation or about any forms of structural domination (apartheid, confinement of the "indigenous" populations , slavery) in the societies of the south which remain one of the privileged research fields of anthropology ;
- places appointed to thought and to research in these societies of the south where change balances between accumulation of knowledges and applications, basic research and expertise, solicitations of anthropology and autonomous buildings of its objects.
Facing these new contexts, anthropological exercise sees its outlines and its inevitably questioned stakes. From the confrontation of empirical experiments, the objective of this symposium is therefore to discuss the actuality of reflexive step in anthropology around three supplementary topics.
Reflexive exercise in the service of the production of knowledges
Whatever is the point of anthropological step which it concerns, we hear the exercise of reflexivity as the condition of production and of renewal of - knowledge. In this perspective, it is a question of seeing how the object of study shows itself entirely during the situations of inquiry and in what this reflexive return can be at the same time an instrument of investigation, a means of cross-checking of gathered data, and a necessary stage at the opening of new research tracks. - Without making this exercise an end in itself, and while avoiding the reefs of narcissism and of subjectivism, we therefore want to think during this first session of the heuristic available symposium of reflexivity which is in the principle of anthropological step.
Indeed, lean over its methods in fields transformed by what will be named the generic term of "crises" (self-defining, political, economic), or wonder about its frames of analysis while they determine the increasing difficulty of a cumulative approach of anthropological knowledge, or else to analyse stakes around the production of speech in peculiar contexts, so much important decisions are which allow not only to enrich the corpus with épistémologiques questions and methodological treated by anthropology, but also to help in a better understanding of noticed phenomena.
In other words, we offer that is discussed and illustrated the idea according to which reflexivity is founder of knowledge renewed by the social and not only look which it is possible to carry on this one. So, for example c questions to be discussed, they will mention that concerning difficult scientific popularisation in anthropology - compared with the one what succeed in producing "hard" sciences - ; difficulty which cannot be loosened of the official report of a fine border between the object of anthropological speech " Vulgarisable " and "common sense" . To think of this difficulty is also the means to renovate its thought on the complexity of the social.
It is in this capacity to question its practice to be able to develop innovative research problems that will be dedicated communications of this first session.
Reflexivity and interdisciplinarity
The appeal in interdisciplinarity can be one of the solutions favoured to develop new research perspectives, and it all the more so as anthropology is more and more in situation to work with other disciplines, including except the field of social sciences. This "situation" can result from collaboration which it will have voluntarily provoked, or to happen since she would answer a request. Moreover, anthropology, without using interdisciplinary devices willy-nilly, invests objects in the margins of various disciplines : the economic, the bathroom or policy provoke anthropological looks which fan out at the same time as those of the disciplines the heart of reflexion of which they constitute. In the one as in the other situation, anthropology must perform an exercise of negotiation. Negotiation of its methodological choices and of its problématisation of research questions, his own conception of anthropological exercise and of his theoretical corpus, as well when she « works with » other disciplines than when she is interested in objects of interdisciplinarity.
Linking illustrations and conceptualisations of these two situations of interdisciplinarity, reflexion waited during this second session will be able to wonder about the effects of such positions on the practice of anthropology : these disciplinary openings, which they cross by new objects or by confrontation to different disciplinary paradigms, do release from a renovation of anthropology or from its levelling by the bottom, resulting from an affadissement of its methods and its theoretical referents ? Are they exclusive in other ways « of making anthropology » or do give body to other disciplines ( "socio-anthropology" ,’ " applied anthropology " ) ?
Questions of method and ethics
Inseparable of the emergence of new objects and new contexts, methods and ethics of anthropology think they are deeply implicated. As for our methods, our objects reformulated according to directions pointed out before notably make reconsider the question of observation participant : up to what point does she structure ethnography, which are do new forms and how modulate facing pressures of deontological order ? On this last point, the anthropologist is indeed more and more often in research situations (both at the level of the conception of his study and in the course of his ground) where he thinks he is confronted with necessity of’ "arbitration" around :
- the building of an inquiry with consistent methodological tools with regard to its anthropological question setting ;
- the inscription of its step in a certainly pre-existing deontological frame but for which it is necessary to negotiate terms permanently (preservation of confidentiality, worry of the anonymity of its sources, will to keep a distant look which is not uninterested) ;
- the increasing taxation by the subjects of its inquiries (individuals, social, family or religious groups, professional networks) conditions of research : rights of possession on collected visual and sound recording, rights of inspection on the produced analyses, shaped stories of life or envisaged publications ;
- the difficulty in delimiting a definite reference frame of the object due to the multiplicity of levels to arrest (the place worldwide) and of the number growing by data carriers to be considered ;
- the increasing heterogeneity of local situations to be linked to the mobility of the actors and to the multiplication of the levels of language. These new pressures influencing exercise of anthropology follow several essential questionings on choices and borders of the inquiry, on the existence of some "self-censorship" , on the way of dealing its place, and more widely on the social manners of knowledges. The objective of this last session will therefore be to update debate on deontological stakes, or even ethical, ethnological practice with regard to changes happened on our fields of inquiry.
Scientific committee
FRANCIS AFFERGAN (Paris 5 university)
MICHEL AGIER (IRD - EHESS, Manager of the Centre of Africain Studies)
FRANCIS AKINDES (national University of Ivory Coast)
FRANK ALVAREZ-PEREYRE (Paris 5 university, manager de l' UMR « Languages, Musics, Societies »)
DORIS BONNET (IRD)
JACKY BOUJU (University of Provence - Aix-Marseille I)
ROBERT GIBB (University of Glasgow)
MARC-ERIC GRUENAIS (IRD, manager de l' UR « Actors and system of health in Africa »)
JEANS JAMIN (EHESS) MONDHER KILANI (University of Lausanne)
GÉRARD LENCLUD (NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, manager du Département « Men and Societies »)
OLIVIER LESERVOISIER (Paris 5 university) LAURENT VIDAL (IRD)
Committee of organisation
JACKY BOUJU (University of Provence - Aix-Marseille I)
MARC-ERIC GRUENAIS (IRD, Manager Research unit « Actors and system of health in Africa »)
OLIVIER LESERVOISIER (Paris 5 university)
LAURENT VIDAL (IRD)
Postscript : International Symposium co-organised by Donatecarcenter.com-AIX January 24th, 25th and 26th, 2007, University of Provence, Campus Saint-Charles, Marseilles
In the same rubric :
- A worldwide social forum in Africa. Nairobi 2007 - Africain Reasons and militant extroversion
- Religious public areas : Islam and policy in Western Africa (XIXTH - XXITH centuries)
- Link in the stock in Africa and elsewhere
- Dance and Africain aesthetics
- Modes of links in the territory in a perspective specialist in comparative linguistics (with references to the voltaic world, begs and Guinean)
- Big disasters and chronic riot. Politics and colonial expertises facing health crises in Africa, on 1900-1960
- Searches of the sites of Gedi (Kenya), Songo Mnara and Sanjé ya Kati (Tanzania) :
- Stakes and democratic challenges in Guinea (February, 2007 - December, 2010)
- Mobilities, traces and borders in Africa of the Great Lakes, XIITH - XXITH century
- Comparative Perspectives On Land Tenures Systems : Medieval And Modern Ethiopia And France
- Empathy in anthropology
- The policies of slavery and of abrogation in Africa. Historical and contemporary perspectives : Around recent works
- 1957-1967. Madagascar : the commemoration of the rebellion of 1947 or the research of a policy of fair memory
