This series of meetings highlights the intertwining of cultural anthropology and anarchist thought. This connection is traced by considering some of the constitutive aspects of anthropology’s theoretical framework, some of its fundamental thematic areas, and aspects of its research method.
The aim is to convey a skill and an educational value that can be applied in all those areas of social intervention where a cooperative rather than authoritarian approach is adopted or, in other words, where power over is to be replaced by power with.
On the level of knowledge and epistemology, this workshop ties a theoretical knot (taking the metaphor of the knot in a positive sense) between the basic concepts of cultural anthropology and the premises of anarchist thought.
Anthropological recognition (recognising a person with somatic or cultural differences as a fellow human being), at such a basic level of relationship, presupposes not only emancipation from ethnocentric or racist prejudice but also an orientation towards an encounter between human beings that is free and spontaneous and does not set up hierarchical differences or hegemonic positions. In its thematic areas, economics, politics or religion seen from an anthropological perspective reveal a range of human diversity that can be fully grasped only if there is a genuine willingness to take a stance freed from every kind of prejudice.
In this sense, anarchist thought proves to be a propaedeutic to anthropology. As regards ethnographic method, the hermeneutic narrative interview can effectively be presented as a space/time of free expression, purely cognitive and shared.
Programme
- Introduction to cultural anthropology. Spontaneous anthropology and anthropological recognition (3 hours)
- Political anthropology. Native American peoples (3 hours)
- Economic anthropology. From Marshall Sahlins to David Graeber (3 hours)
- Anthropology of religion. Shamanic traditions (3 hours)
- Ethnographic methodology. The hermeneutic narrative interview (3 hours)
The workshop is held in Italian.
