World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems

of Power
Claudia Briones

Collaborative Anthropologies, Volume 1, 2008, pp. 205-210 (Review)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/cla.0.0012

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other African countries. Currently he is the chair of the Department of Anthropology
at Michigan State University and a board member of the International Work Group
for Indigenous Affairs.

Megan Biesele and Robert K. Hitchcock have just completed a new book, The Ju/’hoan San
of Namibia since Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Namibia, to be
published by Berghahn Books (Oxford).

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, eds. World Anthropologies:

Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. New York: Berg, 2006.
320 pp. Paper, $34.95.
claudia briones, University of Buenos Aires and National Council for
Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET, Argentina)

As the result of a Wenner-Gren International Symposium held in Porde-

none, Italy, March 7–13, 2003, this book is a significant step in the con-
formation of the World Anthropologies Network (WAN), defined as
“an experiment in global cooperation” in Lins Ribeiro and Escobar’s
words (ix). The main goal of both endeavors is not only to examine and
promote changes in the relationships among anthropologists in differ-
ent locations but to analyze the dynamics and effects of what Tomas
Gerholm (1995) has called the “world system of anthropology.” Rober-
to Cardoso de Oliveira’s “peripheral anthropologies,” Esteban Krotz’s
“anthropologies of the South” (conceived as a sort of “anthropologies
without history” in Eric Wolf ’s terms), Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of
power,” Walter Mignolo’s “geopolitics of knowledge” and “diversali-
ty,” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “provincializing Europe project” are all taken
as valuable antecedents to developing epistemological, theoretical, and
political awareness of the conditions affecting our discipline’s process-
es of knowledge production and communalization (Brow 1990).
The common purpose of analyzing the “world system of anthropol-
ogy” is to reflect and comment critically on the genesis and impacts of
power relationships and asymmetries within the anthropological com-
munity at large. The aim of such recognition is not to voice resentments
but to rethink contexts for open, reciprocally enriching exchanges and
dialogues. One founding premise is that the consolidation of an “in-
ternational anthropology” and the immersion of different academies in
transnational processes cannot be seen as the result of simple processes
of imposition, borrowing, adaptation, or contestation; they depend
Book Reviews •  205
 instead on many factors, argue editors Lins Ribeiro and Escobar, “from
nation building and national structures of alterity to institution build-
ing and opportunities for exchanges” (9).
Amidst such a backdrop, each of the book’s chapters explore and
highlight different incarnations and consequences of the unequal struc-
turing of the system in terms of theory consumption, definition of re-
search agendas, institution building, financial support, access to re-
sources, language, interpersonal relationships, brain drain, or, as Paul
Nchoji Nkwi conveys,“catch-22” predicaments for “Third World” col-
leagues trapped in the cross fire of being suspected of partaking in the
colonial heritage of universal academic standards while trying to inter-
vene in the pressing public agenda of their nation-states. As a result,
the editors identify, and find productive to keep in tension, two perspec-
tives that traverse the volume. One approaches anthropology as a uni-
fied field, a sort of unity, admitting diversity, but doubting that we can
do without some universals or unified language—that is, if we want
to “make communication, and hence collective action, possible,” as
Susana Narotzky states (146). The other anchors itself in the idea of di-
versality as a point of departure that opens up “new dialogic possibili-
ties” and “other avenues of engagement” by taking into account “mul-
tiple histories, trajectories, languages, conceptual frameworks, political
commitments, experiences of transnationalism, and networking” (24).
For those of us anthropologists who read in English and have access
to international books, it is both a luxury and a powerful tool in and of
itself to have in a single piece critical explorations of the discipline’s
developments in Japan (by Shinji Yamashita), Siberia (Nikolai Vakhtin),
China (Josephine Smart), Mexico (Esteban Krotz), France (Eduardo
Archetti), Spain (Susana Narotzky), Cameroon and Africa at large (Paul
Nchoji Nkwi), United Kingdom (Eeva Berglund), Peru (Marisol de la
Cadena), Australia (Sandy Toussaint), India (Shiv Visvanathan), and
Brazil (Otávio Velho) along with a contextualizing introduction by the
two editors and a final, insightful discussion by Johannes Fabien. And
it is so for at least three main reasons.
First, it is as much useful as unusual to have a book that updates the
readership on such a wide spectrum of case studies that illustrate the
ways in which anthropological academies have been affected by the
“empire-building” and “nation-building” processes of their respec-
tive home countries. This variety is strengthened by the fact that the
206  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 1 • 2008
sample includes academies that belong to the global south and also
to the hegemonic core. Like Lins Ribeiro and Escobar, I agree with the
importance of provincializing the United States (even if not just for
Latin Americans) by envisioning “research projects focused on North
American subjects” (12). Thus, the only expectation I find unaccom-
plished is that precisely the United States becomes the missing “case
study” here.
Second, the chapters’ grounded discussions put forward not simply
the relationships between centers and peripheries from the authors’
situated locations; more importantly, they put forward the formation
of peripheries within the centers and of centers within the peripher-
ies for case studies transformed into loci of enunciation and commit-
ment. In this regard, the decision to feature resident but non-national
anthropologists as well as independent native scholars examining the
trajectory of core academies enriches the collection. In the future, how-
ever, for the “world anthropologies project” to be a truly dialogic en-
terprise, having native anthropologists working within “main league”
institutions can be an interesting and vital move to enrich these ongo-
ing debates.
Last but not least is the consistency with which the participants share
a concern with assessing how to democratize relationships among col-
leagues—especially once we acknowledge that only a small number of
the anthropologists of the world are fluent in English and have access
to international books, and that many of those strategically located in
both regards neither manage sociologically and academically margin-
al languages nor consider it valuable to engage in dialogue with “mi-
nor” academies. It may seem a flaw for those of us who live and work in
the global South not to read or know “the classics” and keep updated.
Conversely the lack of proficiency in local classics and readings that we
consider “basic” more often than not goes unnoticed or is just seen as
a negligible fault by those whose institutional affiliations allow them to
recreate the global cannon in anthropology inadvertently. If outcomes
of this sort can be seen as the result of the tension between what Lins
Ribeiro and Escobar call “provincial cosmopolitanism” and “metropol-
itan provincialism” (13), the book demonstrates that there is no smooth
path leading to the pluralization of a discipline in need of revising re-
lationships (not only “among” academies but also “within” them) and
of reflecting critically upon the pecking order of knowledge (not simply
Book Reviews •  207
 among colleagues but mainly between practitioners and interlocutors).
Both challenges meet obstacles of their own, even if nested.
In the first instance, Otavio Velho points to the possibility that a na-
ive definition of peripheral anthropologies as a necessary source of al-
ternative ideas can foster neo-orientalist perspectives, and may even
end up fostering the asymmetric, neocolonial, burdensome mandate of
performing as the reservoir of resources to an alleged crisis of imagina-
tion in the centers. In the second instance, Marisol de la Cadena con-
vincingly argues that José María Arguedas could envision and engage in
a multiple ontologism for and from Perú, because of the more explicit
intercultural subjectivities, which are fostered in countries that have
not spread an all-embracing modernity—and modernist epistemolo-
gies and politics—evenly. Yet Arguedas’s intuition was not understood
by his contemporary peers, and his “attempts to redirect mestizaje into
interculturalidad” somehow were more a part of his literary world than
of his ethnological pieces (203).
The incompleteness of modernist projects can be seen as a promis-
ing starting point, even more so once we take in Eeva Berglund’s argu-
ment that there are also multiple modernities within the West. In sum,
the porosities and leakages of modernist projects of life and knowledge
open up conditions for cognitive pluralism everywhere at this point of
the world system. Yet, Marisol de la Cadena also states that “the dy-
namics and hierarchies of hegemonic knowledge, continue to pervade
the production of interculturalidad” (219).
To structure his final comments, Johannes Fabian reformulates the
topic of the book as a series of questions about anthropology at large:
Who? When? Where? What? How? So? Lins Ribeiro and Escobar add
the “What for?” to the list. Arguedas’s example compels me to intro-
duce another question much more concerned with Fabian’s statement
that “we have been living with fundamental contradictions between dis-
course and research practices” (282). Why? The “why” I propose here
does not address “us” just as bearers of an authorized even if deceiv-
ing universal knowledge—a topic that the book thoroughly discusses
and develops. It addresses “us” in our heterogeneities—as Archetti’s
contribution so suggestively does for the French academy, and other
chapters do as well—to highlight other dimensions of anthropological
diversity and diversality.
By heterogeneities, I do not simply refer to differences in political
208  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 1 • 2008
persuasions or in the visibility and prestige that colleagues acquire ac-
cording to their focus on international or national research agendas. I
am mainly concerned with bringing into focus the effects of our being
actors and agents of complex, broader scenarios; and of our becoming
implicated by asymmetries where the academic/nonacademic divide
is just one of the cleavages in force. In these arenas, the nested rela-
tionships and interpellations that shape our subjectivities (subjection,
“we” call it) render illusory the very “we, anthropologists” that each
of us uses to bring home safely our narratives of the self, or to install
our profession strategically vis-à-vis varied audiences (subjectification,
“we” used to say).
My suggestion of decentering the “we, anthropologists” even fur-
ther, thus is less a call to give it up than a maneuver to expand the scope
of the “why” question in such a way that it might even allow us to (re)
articulate our multiple belongings with more awareness: Why is it
that, as one of our sociological common understandings asserts, not
always and not any subordination (economic, political, or epistemic)
can transform itself into an antagonism, productively and explicitly in-
grained into academic discourse and practice?
For such a transformation to operate, the open-ended character of
modernist projects seems to work just as a necessary condition. But
to produce grounded knowledge, we need to move further, using “he-
gemony” as a heuristic and not as a (self )explanatory concept. So, the
pressing research agenda still is, for all of us, what factors can work as
sufficient conditions.
Once we take into account the complexity of the scenarios and sit-
uations in and against which “we” become and think of ourselves as
actors or agents, I cannot be confident that we anthropologists of the
South are automatically better equipped than those of the North to
democratize the anthropological episteme. Perhaps we simply are in
a better position to unlearn our privileges because we can transfer to
northern colleagues a set of claims that our interlocutors often posit to
us. But these are not sufficient conditions either, it seems.
In any event, even if the mere enunciation of tensions and antago-
nisms does not guarantee in itself the occurrence of expected or de-
manded transformations, bringing diagnoses and discussions of this
sort into the open is a necessary as much as productive step toward the
envisioning of a more emancipatory politics (academic included). In
Book Reviews •  209
 this regard, the authors have put the ball in motion with sophisticat-
ed anthropological skill. Now we all can enjoy the liberating intradis-
ciplinary and transnational game of bringing some of “our” skeletons
out of the closet.
• • • • •
claudia briones is a professor of anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires
and a researcher for the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research
(CONICET) in Argentina. Her primary research areas are indigenous movements,
rights, and policy; differentiated citizenships and national formations of alterity
in Argentina; kinship, knowledge, and politics of the Mapuche People. Her most
recent publications include Contemporary Perspectives on the Native Peoples of Pampa,
Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego: Living on the Edge (coedited with J. Lanata, 2002),
Metacultura del estado-nación y estado de la metacultura (2005), and Cartografías
Argentinas: Políticas indigenistas y formaciones provinciales de alteridad (editor, 2005).

References
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pological Quarterly 63 (1): 1–6.
Gerholm, Thomas. 1995. “Sweden: Central Ethnology, Peripheral Anthropology.” In
Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology, ed. H. F. Vermeu-
len and A. A. Roldán, 159–70. London: Routledge.

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