Full Description
This book explores the role and implications of responsibility for anthropology, asking how responsibility is recognised and invoked in the world, what relations it draws upon, and how it comes to define notions of the person, institutional practices, ways of knowing and modes of evaluation. The category of responsibility has a long genealogy within the discipline of anthropology and it surfaces in contemporary debates as well as in anthropologists' collaboration with other disciplines, including when anthropology is applied in fields such as development, medicine, and humanitarian response. As a category that unsettles, challenges and critically engages with political, ethical and epistemological questions, responsibility is central to anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, collaborative research, and applied engagement. With chapters focused on a variety of cultural contexts, this volume considers how anthropology can contribute to a better understanding of responsibility, including the 'responsibility of anthropology' and the responsibility of anthropologists to specific others.
Contents
Introduction: Anthropology and responsibility
Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti and Christos Lynteris
1 Edgy imaginaries: "Ghost'"orangutans, extinction, and responsibility in a plantation landscape
Liana Chua
2 The responsibility to consume: Excessive 'environmentourism' against rhinoceros extinction in South Africa
Stasja Koot
3 Responsibility versus responsibilization: Mafiacraft, witchcraft and the rise of conspiracy thinking today
Peter Geschiere
4. In the wake of disenchantment: Silence and the limits of ethnographic attentiveness
Yana Stainova
5 The vulnerability vortex: Health, exclusion, and social responsibility
David Napier and Anna-Maria Volkmann
6 Keeping things under control: Responsibilities towards things, homes, people in hoarding disorder
Rebecca Henderson and Laurin Baumgardt
7 Racialized positionalities: Ethnographic responsibility and the anthropology of racism and white supremacy
Sofía Ugarte
8 Of Calcutta, death and the South: Juxtaposing three Calcuttas/Kolkatas
Debarun Sarkar
9 The countess' diaries and taonga Māori: Twenty-first century collaborations around nineteenth century collecting
Kirsty Kernohan
10 Responsibility and complicity in the UK "hostile environment"
Joel White
