Roundtable

Reviewed by: Association of Senior Anthropologists

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Teaching

Secondary Theme: Policy

(2-0340) Conversations across Generations: Anthropology and its Publics

This round table brings together senior and junior anthropologists to discuss current topics in the discipline and the role of anthropology in recent public debates. Drawing on participants’ varied personal and professional experiences, we will reflect on fieldwork as a defining aspect of the discipline as well as anthropology’s place in universities and American culture more broadly.

While fieldwork has been a rite of passage that unites different generations of anthropologists, practices of fieldwork, the experience of doing it, and its enabling assumptions and conditions have also transformed over the decades. What intellectual and economic developments have contributed to these transformations? How do they affect the definition and practice of our discipline? To what extent is fieldwork a form of political engagement and/or personal discovery? We will also consider anthropology’s changing public engagements both within universities and beyond. While there is a generally held belief that our discipline contributed to the conceptualization of an anti-racist agenda in the first half of the twentieth century, and developed hand in hand the civil rights movement, how does anthropology carry on this legacy and speak to contemporary debates about race, ethnicity and gender that are prevalent on college campuses and in society at large? What is or could be the role of anthropology in the public sphere today?

The round table will invite participants to speak to these topics through questions about, among other topics, their discovery of anthropology, graduate training, emotional engagement with interlocutors, discoveries while conducting research, interactions with field sites and consultants over time, relationships with mentors and students, and their engagement with publics beyond academic settings.

Chair(s)

• Pablo Landa

  Fototeca Nuevo Leon

Organizer(s)

• William Mitchell

  Emeritus
  Monmouth University

• Sofia Pinedo-Padoch

  Princeton University

Presenter(s)

• Sidney Greenfield

  Professor Emeritus
  University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• William Mitchell

  Professor Emeritus (Anthropology)
  University of Vermont

• Tim Wallace

  Associate Professor and Anthropology Program Director
  North Carolina State University

• Jeffrey Ehrenreich

  University of New Orleans

• Barbara Joans

  director- retired-consultant DIRECTOR- MERRITT MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY
  Merritt Museum of Anthropology

Discussant(s)

• Saul Schwartz

  University of California, Berkeley

• Anita Spring

  Professor Emerita
  University of Florida