Anthropology Southern Africa warmly invites you to join us in Mzansi/South Africa for the inaugural World Anthropological Union (WAU) Congress from November 11 to 15, 2024.
Organized by Anthropology Southern Africa and hosted by the University of Johannesburg, this groundbreaking event promises a rich exploration of anthropological knowledge under the theme:
Reimagining Anthropological Knowledge: Perspectives, Practices, and Power
Anthropology, as with other disciplines in the arts and social sciences, has engaged over decades with multiple paradigmatic shifts and critiques of the ways in which anthropological knowledge is gathered, organised, presented and theorised. From the 1960s onwards, anthropological knowledge has engaged with, and seen concomitant shifts in practice as a result of [post – ] theoretical movements:
Post-structuralism;
Post-modernism;
Post-colonialism;
Post-socialism;
Post-humanism;
Post- post-colonialism -> decolonial shift;
Post-truth.
Recent shifts in some spaces have also critiqued even the notion of ‘post-’, such as the decolonial movement, for example, which argues that post-colonialism does not take critique far enough, and that social theory should strive instead for decolonial approaches.
All of these critiques share a core concern with recognising the constructedness of knowledge, and the power relations that underlie what we know and how we know it. Anthropology has a slightly different perspective to many other social science disciplines in that the discipline itself is premised on a recognition of the inherent value of plural knowledge forms, through cultural relativism and an historic and contemporary disciplinary stance against ethnocentrism.
Against this set of concerns, we propose a WAU Congress that engages with anthropological knowledge making in its various forms, recognising theoretical, geographical, socio-political contextual and ontological differences in how anthropological knowledge is made, transmitted and distributed in varied spaces.