AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
WORLD ANTHROPOLOGY
Interview
Interview with Professor Hyang Jin Jung, Chair, Department
of Anthropology, Seoul National University
Virginia R. Dominguez
Associate Editor for World Anthropology
Emily Metzner
Editorial Assistant for the World Anthropology section
Hyang Jin Jung is a professor and the current chair of the Department
of Anthropology at Seoul National University in South Korea.
She received her PhD in 2001 in cultural anthropology from the
University of Minnesota, in the United States. Her research interests
lie at the intersection of culture, self, and emotion, with the US
and North Korea as her primary anthropological sites. Her ongoing
research projects include the emotional culture of contemporary
postmodern US society and the psychocultural underpinnings of
North Korean statehood and society. She is author of Learning to
Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior
High School (2007).
Virginia R. Dominguez (VRD): Can you tell us
about your work? I know you study both the United States
and North Korea, isn’t that so? How did you come to choose
these sites?
Hyang Jin Jung (HJJ): When I came to the US for
a doctoral degree, I had Korea in mind for my disserta-
tion work. To me, South Korea, where I was born and
raised, was the strangest place in the world and deserved
a full anthropological inquiry. After I finished my master’s
degree at Seoul National University, I collected extensive
field notes over several years while working as a teacher
and doing participant-observation in a junior high school.
I planned to use these notes for my future PhD work.
Then at the University of Minnesota, I had an opportu-
nity to do a field study in an American high school for an
ethnographic methods course. That was truly my first seri-
ous “cross-cultural” experience. During the fieldwork at the
high school, I kept asking questions that were very important
to Korean teachers but “unfamiliar” to the American teach-
ers. The coexistence of similarities and differences between
Korean and American schools gave me a visceral understand-
ing of what anthropology is all about, I think. So I decided
to take an anthropological detour by doing PhD work about
adolescent socialization in a junior high school in the US.
After that, I was going to do South Korea. But then, after
I returned to South Korea, I joined a research team that
worked with North Korean refugees. To my generation of
South Koreans, growing up under heavy anti-Communist
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 4, pp. 838–858, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12698
ideological education, North Korea did not even exist on
planet earth. The work with North Korean refugees pre-
sented fascinating anthropological questions, again from an
amalgam of the familiar and the unfamiliar. North Korea
soon became my other anthropological site. The biggest re-
ward of researching North Korea is my realization that South
Korea and North Korea may have walked a very different
pathway on the route to modernity, but they are twins mir-
roring each other—perhaps like long-lost twins who grew
up in radically different environments. I said earlier that I
started anthropology because I wanted to understand South
Korea, and through North Korea, I come to better under-
stand the puzzle that is South Korea. Of course, to us South
Koreans, North Korea is an urgent research topic, too.
Now that I do both the US and North Korea, it is inter-
esting that these two countries never talk to each other in
reality. They don’t even have a diplomatic relationship. But
they constantly talk to each other in me. Each presents theo-
retical questions to the other, back and forth. For example,
the theatricality of North Koreans’ public behavior makes me
ask questions about the theatrical nature of self-presentation
among Americans and vice versa; the American preoccupa-
tion with self-realization leads me to ponder about selfhood
among North Koreans under their political circumstances.
VRD: You told me in person that you do not like
being interviewed. I think that is probably true of many
anthropologists, but you still agreed to being interviewed for
the World Anthropology section of American Anthropologist.
May I ask why?
HJJ: I have this notion that musicians communicate with
their music; politicians with their political actions; writers
with writing; and scholars with their scholarly works.
VRD: But you interview lots of people.
HJJ: That’s for my ethnography—it’s different! But
maybe, after all the interviews that I’ve asked for, I should
sit for one too.
VRD: So why did you agree to be interviewed by me?
HJJ: Well, you asked, and it’s an honor to be inter-
viewed and also maybe an opportunity to talk about Korean
anthropology through my case. In no way do I represent
Korean anthropology, but I’m based there.
VRD: Is it an honor because it is American Anthropologist?
HJJ: I wouldn’t deny the prestige that American An-
thropologist has, but this is a forum for anthropologies from
C 2016 by the American Anthropological

different parts of the world to come together through this
medium. If this kind of forum existed elsewhere, it would
also be an honor to be included there, too.
VRD: Since I know that you have done extensive field-
work in the US, I must ask if the US is a popular area of
anthropological study in the Republic of Korea (commonly
known in the English-speaking world as South Korea) or if
you are actually fairly unusual there. If you think that the US
is a popular area of anthropological study in the Republic of
Korea, how does it manifest itself? And, if it isn’t, how does
that manifest itself?
HJJ: My US work is not mainstream in (South)
Korea. In Korean academia as a whole, the US is frequently
studied, particularly in English literature, political science,
international relations, and history. But it is not a popular
area in anthropology. For a certain discipline or research
area to flourish, there has to be demand and support from
the general public. To the Korean public, the US appears too
familiar and too distant at the same time to inspire, say, an
anthropological romance. It is too familiar through Holly-
wood and the market. American pop music and Hollywood
movies have long been part of “modern” life in Korea. Now
Starbucks is on every corner, and the obsession with the En-
glish language (especially American English, but in addition
to the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, and
Philippines are frequent destinations for middle-class Kore-
ans studying English abroad) is gripping the whole country.
The political and military alliance between South Korea and
the US is another factor that makes the US too familiar to
the Korean public. However, it is too distant for those of us
living on the Korean peninsula, whose immediate regional
concerns are mainly in Northeast Asia. The result is that
American popular culture and American politics are pop-
ular topics and mundane concerns among South Koreans,
but American culture—culture as a way of life in a clas-
sic anthropological sense—doesn’t seem to have a place in
people’s imaginations. It’s interesting, and a bit paradoxical
too, that my fieldwork site is in the Midwestern US, when
it’s almost as though California (because of Hollywood and
Silicon Valley) and Washington, DC (because of the White
House) are the two locations that matter to Koreans and the
vast in-between, including the Midwest, remains very much
muted and unknown to the general public in Korea.
Perhaps another reason that “America” (i.e. the US) is
not often seen as an object of anthropological study is that it
is seen more as a force than a place where actual people live
their lives in their own cultural world, a force that seems
to force the rest of the world to become like America. Of
course, there are the power relations of knowledge pro-
duction that shape anthropological study, too. The US has
historically been where the anthropologist comes from, not
goes to.
Korean anthropologists rarely do their fieldwork in the
US. Some did their dissertation work in the US while study-
ing in degree programs there, but once they are based in
Korea, the sheer physical distance and perhaps the perceived
World Anthropology 839
lack of public interest seem to discourage continuing field-
work in the US. I should tell you that I struggle to maintain
my research program on the US because it is very hard to find
an audience in Korea. Even internationally, it’s very hard
to find anthropologists based outside the US but studying it.
It’s no wonder that I feel intellectually lonely.
Another factor in my intellectual solitude concerns the
question of the relevance of anthropology to Korean soci-
ety. My work on the US presents me with ethnographic
scenes and theoretical questions that are just as exciting,
challenging, and fascinating as any other “exotic” culture and
that are extremely pertinent to contemporary life in South
Korea. But when I am faced with this implicit principle that
academic research must be (directly) relevant and (imme-
diately) useful to Korean society, I feel like I can’t really
justify my US work other than saying that it is going to be
useful in the long run. That’s why international relations
and English literature are two dominant fields in US studies
in South Korea, the former supported by the importance of
the political alliance with the US and the latter by “English
fever.” Doing anthropology is already a luxury, and doing
anthropology of the US seems to be a double luxury.
VRD: Are certain topics favored (and other topics not
favored) in contemporary Korean anthropology? I was think-
ing of research specialties, but it might be interesting to think
of this also in terms of teaching areas.
HJJ: East Asia broadly conceived is the favored regional
area, at least in our department. The East Asian focus has
three subareas: Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and Korean
Studies. Our department has historically emphasized East
Asia since its founding, first with Northeast Asia and later
expanding it to include Southeast Asia. Now that we’ve just
received this state funding for graduate student training and
internationalization, we want to further strengthen the East
Asian focus. The funding from the Korean government is a
historic feat on our part. We won it over other very compet-
itive, bigger departments, like sociology and psychology, in
both our university and other top universities, which ranked
above our department in terms of the number of publi-
cations and other quantitative standards of evaluation. So
we take this opportunity to really solidify our grounding in
both academia and the broader public. The East Asian fo-
cus is our attempt to be relevant to Korean society and the
region at large, through anthropological engagement. We
also want to develop the Korean Studies component more.
We think that it is high time for anthropological studies
of Korea, particularly because there are international de-
mands on knowledge of Korean culture, many thanks to
K-pop and other K-culture industry. Our department is
receiving more international applications for graduate train-
ing in the anthropology of Korea than ever before. Until
recently we have drawn international students most often
from China and Japan, but increasingly more applications
are coming from other parts of the world as well. Presently
we have students from China, Japan, Russia, Kazakhstan,
the Emirates, Spain, and the US. International students are
840 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
usually interested in Korean culture and society, but some
study their own society, too.
VRD: So they must be fluent in Korean? They take
classes in Korean?
HJJ: Yes, they take classes in Korean. In our depart-
ment, several classes are taught in English by our newly
hired Prof. Olga Fedorenko and once in a while by me, but
the majority of classes are done in Korean, so international
students must be fluent in Korean. The graduate school of
Seoul National University allows thesis writing in English,
so some international students opt to write their theses in
English, especially if English is their first language or they
have competency in English. Even then, if they are work-
ing on Korean culture and society, we try to train them in
academic Korean, because they should be able to utilize the
Korean scholarship on their chosen research topic.
Outside our department, there are quite a few Korean
anthropologists whose regional specialty is other than East
Asia, such as India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Some of our stu-
dents are doing their work on other areas, too. Uzbekistan,
Catalonia, Iran, India, and Cuba are among recent past or
current field sites of our master’s and PhD students, while
the majority of our students do their fieldwork in various
parts of East Asia.
VRD: You chose to come to the US to get graduate
training (and you did so at the University of Minnesota).
May I ask why? And do you, therefore, tend to see yourself
as doing US-style anthropology even if you are based in
Korea?
HJJ: My BA was from Pusan National University but in
the College of Education. After my master’s degree course-
work in anthropology at Seoul National University, I worked
in a middle school—a junior high school—for a while as an
English teacher. During that time, I also wrote my master’s
thesis on teachers’ social organization. After the master’s
thesis, as I became more immersed in teaching, I came to
develop interests in human development, socialization, and
personhood—classic themes in psychological anthropology.
I wanted to come to the US for doctoral training simply
because anthropology was more developed in the US at that
time. Also, a practical reason was that I had some compe-
tence in American English; I didn’t want to have to learn
another foreign language or a different English for my doc-
toral studies. Other than that, I didn’t know much. I had
some ideas about what I wanted to do in anthropology,
but the rest was sort of worked out for me. I was just so
fortunate to have two excellent teachers in psychological
anthropology, Kathleen Barlow and John Ingham, and one
in educational anthropology, Marion Lundy-Dobbert, at the
University of Minnesota.
Psychological anthropology still fascinates me, for its ul-
timate concern about the intertwining relationship between
the psyche and the sociocultural world. I really think that
psychological anthropology sustains my youthful fascination
with anthropology that I felt in my early twenties, when I
first discovered it. But because this subdiscipline is a very
American one indeed, it heavily relies on American concepts
of self, emotion, and person as building blocks. Think about
self and emotion. These are key concepts in psychological
anthropology, but they are drawn from very individualistic
conceptions of the person and psychic process. We all know
experientially that emotion is something we personally feel
but that it is also social currency. Emotion is generated in the
interpersonal and intersubjective arenas and, as such, flows
through persons. But the very concept of “emotion” limits
our understanding of human emotional life. The concept of
“person” is more useful in the Korean context, but “self” is
again a heavily (American) culture-laden concept so that we
have to be very careful when applying it cross-culturally. I
guess any theoretical concept has this risk of being culture
bound. We just need to recognize it and try to expand our
conceptual tool kit beyond the concepts grounded in the
American and Western intellectual and cultural traditions.
Yet South Korea is a great place for psychological an-
thropology. Affective relationality is a core value among
Koreans. There is good reason why Koreans are so adept
at creating melodramas for film and television. Korea has a
very rich affective culture plus a very complicated relation-
ship with modernity after its dynastic history.
VRD: Have you considered working in the US?
HJJ: I am often asked that question, both by Koreans
and Americans. Something about me invites that question,
it seems. I always felt a little bit outside Korean culture.
Korea is a puzzle to me. Other Koreans tell me I’m a little
“off”—that I’m like an American in some ways. My child-
hood friend told me that I’ve always been this way, even
before studying in the US. Maybe it has something to do
with Korean sociability and my introversion. I need a lot of
space. In Korea, people place a high value on being socia-
ble. I never liked engaging in everyday sociability, but I am
not reserved when it comes to intellectual debate and emo-
tional expression. So, my general shyness combined with
expressiveness and straightforwardness may be [viewed as]
an interesting combination. I am feeling very reluctant to
discuss this personal feature of myself. Whatever that is, my
sense of being “psychoculturally” at the periphery of Korean
society makes me an anthropological observer of my own
society and drawn to psychological anthropology.
But when I am in the US, I feel acutely that I am Ko-
rean after all—yes, psychoculturally and otherwise. I have
certainly familiarized myself with some aspects of American
culture, especially through my fieldwork experiences, but
that has nurtured my intercultural sensibility more than any-
thing. Also, in the US, I am seen as a “scholar of color.” I was
taken aback upon first hearing the phrase “scholars of color”
at a conference. Color: I imagine colors, colorful, hues. I in-
stantly thought of pink, blue, green, so I didn’t comprehend
the term at first, but then I realized that the person meant
scholars of “minority” backgrounds in the US and that this
term referred to me whether I liked it or not. My own pre-
ferred identification would be as an “international scholar”
instead of a scholar of color. I say this, because people

outside the US do not necessarily see the world according to
the racial terms used in the US. I know that the term “schol-
ars of color” is not meant to apply to international scholars,
but in some sense it does apply.
VRD: How are you perceived by colleagues in Japan?
China?
HJJ: In Japan, I am seen as a Korean scholar. In China,
as Korean.
VRD: In fact, what relationship is there, or has there
been, in your country with anthropology in Japan, or an-
thropology in China, anthropology in Russia, anthropology
in the US, anthropology in Taiwan, anthropology in North
Korea, or elsewhere? Many of these are very large countries.
Some have colonized or at least occupied the Korean penin-
sula for some years, and some are (or have been) outright
enemies of the Republic of Korea (South Korea).
HJJ: We talk about “East Asia” as a region, but East
Asia as such seems to be a fiction when there is so much
political and military tension. Yet it is becoming a reality
more and more, I think, with the increasing interdependence
of the countries it represents, first and foremost through the
market. China, Korea, and Japan in Northeast Asia have
long had a history of contestation and rivalry as well as
cooperation. In the already-complicated regional dynamics,
the USSR (now Russia) and the US entered the region in the
early 20th century and more directly at the end of WWII,
the Korean peninsula becoming the chief politico-military
stage of the old and new regional drama.
Korea is in the midst of all of these superpowers that seek
to maintain influence there. Japan, China, and even Russia
are so close by, and the US has military troops in South Korea,
and we have North Korea too. I guess that regional histories
can be very complex anywhere, but no other country has all
the superpowers as either their neighbors (friends or foes)
or allies. Historically, the challenge for Korea has been to
steer its own course through the powers. Culturally, this
situation leads to the Korean preoccupation with cultural
identity, combined with national pride. I can only say that
Korea is a fascinating place for anthropological study.
Today, peace in the region appears very precarious. I
think that for anyone in the region, and for Koreans in par-
ticular, regional peace is not something that can be compro-
mised for nationalist causes or anything. Our department as
a community of anthropologists views mutual understanding
as crucial to regional peace building, in which anthropology
should take active part. As I mentioned earlier, the East
Asian focus of our department represents our attempt to be
relevant to the region.
VRD: Is (South) Korea not best seen as “colonized”?
HJJ: Oh, you have to be careful there! It is true that US
troops did not retreat from the peninsula after the Korean
War, instead making permanent bases in many parts of the
country, which is something that North Korea always makes
an issue of. But rather than a colonial encroachment, this
is better seen as a military alliance between South Korea
and the US, born of mutual national interests—South Korea
World Anthropology 841
enhances defense capacity against North Korea while the US
pursues its agenda in Northeast Asia. Koreans as a nation are
a people very proud of their history and identity. Just note
the fact that Korea has remained to this day a people with a
distinct tradition and cultural identity, in between China and
Japan throughout their long history, despite the many inva-
sions, subordination, and even colonization. As I mentioned,
the US and the former Soviet Union recently entered this old
historical and regional drama surrounding the Korean penin-
sula, further complicating the already-complicated regional
situation. Most Koreans are not so naive as to believe that US
troops are in South Korean territory only for the interests of
South Korea, but if US troops are the price we have to pay
for deterring North Korea, that’s what we pay. But to me,
and I believe to almost all Koreans, it hurts to be thought of
as “colonized.” Some of us intellectuals, of course, talk about
Korean society being in a neocolonial situation, but “being
in a neocolonial situation” is not the same as “colonized.” We
know all too well what it is like being colonized.
VRD: I hope I didn’t cross the line there. I posed that
question more as a Latin American and (at least part of the
time) a Latin Americanist than as an interviewer for AA.
HJJ: Yes, any interview involves inter-viewing, so the
interviewer is revealed too!
VRD: I absolutely agree. Speaking of North Korea, do
you or your colleagues tend to view North Korea in a cer-
tain way? You also do anthropological work that focuses on
North Korea, but are you unusual among your South Ko-
rean colleagues in doing that, or is there serious widespread
interest and work on North Korea among anthropologists in
the Republic of Korea?
HJJ: Yes, North Korea plays a big role in Korean think-
ing and is studied seriously in many disciplines. But doing
anthropology on North Korea is not easy, if not impossible.
There are several Korean anthropologists who produced
great anthropological works on North Korea, mostly on
the political culture. I think that I, as a psychological an-
thropologist, am in a better position to do anthropology of
North Korea, compared to general sociocultural anthropol-
ogists. The North Korean propaganda materials, which are
my main data, are like a treasure trove to a psychological
anthropologist. North Korea may be an extreme case, but
for this reason, it is a case in point to show how the state uti-
lizes the psychocultural ground of the society and culturally
constituted psychodynamics of individuals for its political
purposes.
I would love to do fieldwork in North Korea, but that is
not possible at the moment. Once, on a tourist trip to Kum
Gang San, although the village life was shrouded from the
tourists along the roads, I could see glimpses through the
cracks in the barriers. I wanted to get off the bus and walk
across the barrier and talk to people. At the mountain, there
were North Korean vendors. I wanted to ask them about
their lives, but I couldn’t. We had to be very careful.
VRD: You are now chair of your department at SNU
(Seoul National University). I presume that means that your
842 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
colleagues (or at least the deans) trust you. Do you think
that you and your work are seen as examples in (South)
Korea of really good anthropological work being done now
and perhaps even the kind of anthropological work stressed
as good for the near future?
HJJ: It is our custom to have all full professors take
their turn as chair, and it was my turn shortly after I was
promoted. But I think my colleagues do trust me.
VRD: Can you tell us about the grant you’ve been
awarded?
HJJ: My colleagues and I have recently been awarded
a very big grant from the national government to really
develop and train students in a globally oriented type of
social science, this grant program being called “Brain Korea
21.” We are very excited about this. It started in the spring
semester of 2016. The grant money is about 350,000 USD
per year, totaling around 1,600,000 USD for four and a
half years. Approximately 60 percent of the money will be
spent on scholarships and fellowships for our graduate stu-
dents and postdoctoral fellows, and the rest will be spent
on other internationalization efforts. Our students have had
some funding for attending international conferences, ex-
change programs, and overseas fieldwork, but now with
this grant, we will be able to fund more students and more
money for such activities. Along with the existing support
from the university, this grant will be a big boost for our
graduate students. Editorial costs for writing and publishing
in academic English is another area that we will be spend-
ing the money on. We’ll be training students to be scholars
in both Korean and English. And . . . oh dear. It’s diffi-
cult. We still want them to produce strong scholarship in
Korean.
VRD: Your own department consists largely of socio-
cultural anthropologists, with one biological anthropologist
and one linguistic anthropologist, if I remember correctly.
Archaeologists are employed elsewhere on your campus.
Are these numbers a reflection of how anthropology is gen-
erally perceived in the Republic of Korea (South Korea),
and is this largely the result of US anthropological influence
or Japanese anthropological influence?
HJJ: Anthropology in (South) Korea didn’t really de-
velop until the 1970s, when our department at Seoul
National University was established. In our university, ar-
chaeology is in a department that is joint with art history
and is located in the College of Humanities. Anthropology
is a separate department in the College of Social Sciences.
We started as a joint department with archaeology in 1961,
but we separated and moved to social sciences in 1975.
Our department has one biological anthropologist (trained
in the US, who does biometrics and osteology), one linguis-
tic anthropologist, and one anthropologist in folklore studies
(trained in Germany). Our predecessors decided that folk-
lore studies should be part of our department. We are 11
in total, including an upcoming replacement hire this fall.
Out of the current ten faculty members, one does biolog-
ical work and the other nine are considered sociocultural
anthropologists, broadly conceived. The biological anthro-
pologist is a relatively recent addition, so we have yet to see
how the subfield will “evolve” in the department. In fact,
we are the only anthropology department in Korea that has
the biological subfield. I think that the composition we have
reflects both US anthropology (because we incorporate bi-
ological anthropology and linguistic anthropology) and the
German tradition of folklore studies, the latter probably via
Japan. In the early 20th century, Japan introduced folklore
studies to colonial Korea, which became a nationalist enter-
prise to many intellectuals at the time. In Korea, [the field of]
folklore studies garners more popular appeal than anthro-
pology, due to the public’s longing for the “lost tradition.”
So our department wants to capitalize on this public support
for researching traditional culture and folkways.
VRD: How is anthropology perceived in South (and
even North) Korean universities? It is not a large discipline,
right? Is it considered a social science? Is it considered a
liberal–leftist or progressive discipline, a politically conser-
vative discipline, or something else altogether?
HJJ: Institutionally, archaeology is considered indepen-
dent of anthropology and part of the humanities, aligned with
history, art history, or cultural anthropology. Anthropology
varies. In some universities, it is in the college of humanities
and in others, in the college of social sciences. It is often
combined with archaeology in regional universities under
the name “department of archaeology and cultural anthro-
pology.” Overall, there are ten universities and one graduate
institute (Academy of Korean Studies) with an anthropology
department or program, either jointly or independently. In
the Seoul metropolitan area, there are five, including Seoul
National University. The other six are in regional univer-
sities. In general, anthropology departments are small and
constantly face the question of relevance to Korean society,
the question to which major social sciences like economics,
political science, and sociology have been “providing” more
generally recognized answers.
The number of anthropologists who are institutionally
employed is around 120, while the membership of the
Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology numbers over
250. Other than anthropology departments, many are em-
ployed in general divisions and some other departments like
sociology, human ecology, or religious studies. Some are in
research institutes and museums, too.
The ideological spectrum is different in (South) Korea,
at least in part because of North Korea. If you are too “leftist,”
there is the danger of being seen as a Communist, in line
with North Korea. People tend to be more conservative
because of that, although I note that the strong cultural value
placed on communalism and egalitarianism compensates for
the ideological constraint to some degree. I would think that
anthropologists in general tend to be on the “liberal” side in
social issues.
However, in the public’s perception, anthropology as a
discipline is perhaps considered “something else” altogether,
something that is wonderfully interesting and [that] you

would do only if you didn’t have to worry about how to
earn a living. Last semester, when we did an undergradu-
ate conference in our department, undergraduate students
staged a drama about what anthropology is to them. One
student said, “Students in other departments like economics
complain about how difficult their study is; well, anthropol-
ogy is even more difficult, because we have to explain what
it is.” It was hilarious, and I thought that line well reflected
the positioning of anthropology in the university as well as
in the general public.
VRD: Is there an effort these days to create a specifically
Korean anthropology, and would this be something you
would support? Do you ever worry that such a question or
movement could just lead anthropologists in the Republic
of Korea to be antagonistic to other anthropologists outside
the Republic of Korea or at least not very interested in what
anthropologists do around the world?
HJJ: At least in our department, in recent years,
we have taken seriously the possibility and feasibility of
“Korean anthropology” within the kind of constraints we
have, like anthropology’s marginal position in Korean
academia and the immense pressures for academic globaliza-
tion. Since 2014, our department has held a series of interna-
tional conferences to explore and promote Korean anthro-
pology and at the same time to expose our graduate students
to global trends in anthropology. By Korean anthropology,
we do not mean to be antagonistic to other anthropologists
or anthropologies outside Korea. Far from it. Our intention
is to establish an intellectual tradition of anthropology that
is open to global engagement yet reflects our particular con-
cerns and intellectual heritage as Korean anthropologists.
Just to take a metaphor: I am not a fan of K-pop, but still
it sparks inspiration. Who would have thought K-pop and
“Gangnam Style” would become the global phenomena they
have become? Pop music as a genre was obviously imported
from the West, and the US in particular, but I believe the
“K” part of K-pop is what gives it global appeal, whatever
that appeal may be. “Gangnam Style” is a satire on the fast-
tracked affluence that South Korean society has achieved. As
such, it humorously and brilliantly takes issue with the kind
of modernity and modernization that South Korea has so
relentlessly embraced. I know that an academic discipline
cannot be produced and promoted like the culture in-
dustry, but I dream of something like K-anthropology.
Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique
of the Mediation Processes
Anthropologies and Anthropology in Tension: A Preface
Susana Narotzky
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
The articles by Gordon Mathews, Yasmeen Arif, and
Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima came out of a roundtable
World Anthropology 843
K-anthropology would be part of, and contribute to, the
“global commons” of anthropological knowledge by bring-
ing in theoretical and ethnographic dimensions salient in
the Korean context yet with broader implications, such as
state–society relations, affective relationality, and familism
(e.g., in markets, social organization, and politics), as well as
by engaging in theoretical and ethnographic dialogues with
other anthropologies from global and regional traditions.
We tend to think of globalization as Westernization,
Americanization, but I envision more centers of influence.
That’s the opportunity for Korean anthropology—moving
beyond “the West and the rest.”
Emily Metzner (EM): What did you mean when you
said that the US is a “reference point” more than an object
of study?
HJJ: In scholarship, the perception tends to be that
works by American scholars are the works that ought to be
referred to and cited. In the real world, too, at least in
Korea, in policy making and organizational structuring—
for example, in education, welfare, and industry—the US
model is often taken to be the model to refer to. It is difficult
then to relativize American scholarship and US models, to
view them as one of many possible options. This is, I think,
related to the lack of anthropological studies of the US. At
the heart of doing anthropology is relativizing a given cultural
phenomenon in the comparative horizon, but the US seems
to be located outside the comparative horizon. It is ironic
that the US as a society values and promotes diversity, but
“America” as a reference point to the rest of the world drives
uniformity rather than diversity. I am not saying that the
American people are driving this. It seems that “America” as
a force, phenomenon, or condition is something that all of
us on the globe face, including Americans.
VRD: Are there questions you wish I had asked here? If
so, please tell me and proceed to answer it (or them) here.
HJJ: No, but thank you, Virginia and Emily, for your
incisive and daring questions! Thank you also for being such
attentive interlocutors. This was wonderful. Like any good
interview, this interview compelled me to look back and
forward, and in and out. Me as a psychological anthro-
pologist, as an anthropologist of the US and North Korea,
and as a Korean anthropologist, all at once. Many thanks
and cheers to the World Anthropology section and world
anthropologies.
organized by the Committee for World Anthropologies
(CWA) of the AAA, with the sponsorship of the WCAA
(World Council of Anthropological Associations), at the
2015 AAA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. The idea
was to revisit the accomplishments and challenges of World
844 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
Anthropologies in the present and assess the ambivalent
positionalities of those who labor to connect the various
anthropological traditions. Ten years after the founding
of the WCAA, with the revitalization of the IUAES (the
International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological
Societies) and the presence of the CWA within the AAA,
the roundtable sought to address the practice of mediation
between hegemonic and nonhegemonic knowledge tradi-
tions. It sought to clarify the experience, within academia,
of anthropologists trying to mediate between knowledge
practices situated in an unequal power field. The process
by which nationally embedded knowledge extends outward
to reach knowledge produced elsewhere in order to engage
in a wider intellectual conversation is often described as
“internationalization.” However, as Souza Lima brings to
our attention, this process is not innocent of either internal
or external power forces.
The roundtable asked participants to address two sets
of articulated questions: (1) What brokerage positions are
developed by those who actively engage in international-
ization? How are actors who are engaged in these processes
positioned by their own local academic communities
(e.g., as facilitators, opportunists, heroes)? (2) What
new distributions of power and knowledge are produced
through this internationalization process? Should they be
challenged, monitored, transformed, or supported? How
does this affect nonhegemonic anthropological traditions?
Is a new kind of epistemological space emerging, one that
embraces theory produced from very different political
positionalities? In sum, what are the worldwide effects of
this process for anthropological knowledge production?
Forging new connections on equal terms between
anthropologists in different parts of the world was part of
the more general move to open the theoretical conversation
to local participants and collaborators in ethnographic
research. This was a move to decolonize the practice and the
theory of anthropology. However, connections between
different ways of producing anthropological knowledge
are often mediated by individual scholars or academic
institutions that acquire the ambiguous position of “broker.”
They might be seen as belonging neither here nor there;
they might be thought of as serving their own interests;
or they might be hailed as leading their local–national
anthropologies toward a better position in the global power
geometries of knowledge production.
There is a danger in highlighting the differences
between “traditions” of anthropology instead of underlining
their similarities. There is also a problem when the concept
of a “national tradition” homogenizes practices within a
nation that are extremely different among them (e.g.,
opposed methodological schools or theoretical frameworks)
but that might be part of a wider international community
of thought. Nevertheless, there seems to be a process for
defining what “good” theory is that rests on a sociotechnical
and spatial locus, making determinations about the “value”
of knowledge that permeate the field. This is, I suggest,
the hegemony that operates in the global knowledge
field. Against the background of this hegemonic practice
(British-American), there is a danger of exoticizing “the
rest” or of reproducing an arbitrary division mirroring the
arguably obsolete “Area Studies” model. Indeed, being
defined as producers of “peripheral,” “subaltern,” or even
“indigenous” theory sets them immediately in contrast to just
“theory” and as external or tangential to the master matrix
of anthropological knowledge. Yasmeen Arif, following
Derrida’s insight, has engaged with this issue by highlighting
the distinction between evidence and testimony that can
be respectively assigned to hegemonic and nonhegemonic
knowledge. This raises the question of the tension between
“world anthropologies” and “world anthropology” that is
highlighted by Arif and Mathews from different positions
and different locations of the practice of anthropology.
Both contributions propose the centrality of teaching
anthropology for the debate on world anthropology versus
world anthropologies. This is a crucial aspect in the process
of deprovincialization and decolonization of anthropology,
one that appears clearly when teaching anthropology in the
alleged peripheries of knowledge production. Here, propos-
ing a syllabus becomes infused by power dilemmas: one may
surrender to the dominant knowledge; one may become an
activist in support of the (local) subaltern knowledge; or,
in the spirit of world anthropology–world anthropologies,
one may attempt to create a conversation between them
and address their tensions. To do so, however, we need to
know about anthropological production around the world,
something that ICT (Information and Communication
Technologies) tools may help to achieve. The experiment
of Déjà Lu, the e-journal of the WCAA, which publishes
(in their original languages) articles selected by the national
associations of anthropology as significant knowledge
contributions, is commendable, and it would be valuable to
support and expand this initiative. A different experiment
is that of Vibrant, an e-journal of the Association of Brazilian
Anthropology (ABA) that translates pieces written in
Portuguese into other languages such as French, Spanish,
and mostly English in order to expand their audience.
Mediation is often a task of facilitation that requires
interpreting the intended meanings of the parties in
conversation. But it is also an issue of gatekeeping, as
Gordon Mathews’s article points out. This gatekeeping
can be observed in teaching, mentoring, grant proposals
and funding, and publication. The key mechanism in
gatekeeping is that of setting standards of anthropological
“quality.” Standards produce a grid for exercising power.
They produce a framework that appears as neutral but is
in fact strongly embedded in a particular power-knowledge
structure. The styles for presenting a problem and its
background and proposing a hypothesis grow out of
historical developments and regional hegemonies (e.g.,
the German style was hegemonic in Europe in all sciences
at the turn of the 20th century). When teaching our
students and colleagues to use a unique standard, we

are undoubtedly helping others to get past the selection
panels or reviewers, but we are also acting as gatekeepers and
reproducing a hegemony that collapses quality into form.
Language is also crucial. English, which has become an
international instrument of communication, is not neutral
to the native speaker of other languages. The English of
non-English speakers is inflected by their native grammar
and the “spirit of the language.” Language is also an
instrument for excluding the circulation of non-anglophone
knowledge production in the international arena. Indeed, as
Souza Lima’s article exposes, many anthropologists cannot
express themselves in English fluently or at all, which does
not mean that they are not theoretically contributing to
anthropological knowledge. Speaking and writing in English
comes at a cost for the non-anglophone, increasing internal
differentiation in national contexts between those who
attend English-language international conferences and those
who don’t. Therefore, mediation is generally taken on by
those able to speak and write in fluent standard English or
those who have the money to get their contributions trans-
lated. Internationalization of strong national anthropological
practices, such as those of Brazil or Mexico, may come as
a result of internal impact measurement by national institu-
tions that adopt the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information)
Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the
Mediation Processes
Articles
Between World Anthropology and World Anthropologies:
An American Anthropologist in East Asia as
Gatekeeper/Interpreter
Gordon Mathews
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The globalization of anthropology is no longer simply a de-
sirable future but rather a present reality. It used to be that
anthropology consisted of scholars from the United States
and Western Europe studying tribal peoples within their
colonies; more recently, anthropology has consisted of peo-
ple from rich countries studying people from poor countries,
as is still the case today, although to a lesser extent than in
the past. The World Council of Anthropological Associa-
tions (WCAA), founded in 2004, now has 49 members,
consisting of presidents of anthropological societies across
the globe, including the United States, Japan, China, India,
Chile, Mexico, Tunisia, and the Philippines. It holds regular
yearly meetings and fosters numerous research initiatives
to explore how anthropology may exert global influence.
At its most recent full meeting in Manchester in 2013,
the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnolog-
World Anthropology 845
Thomson standard (one of the strongest hegemonic tools in
the evaluation of scientific production). National allocation
of funding for research projects that promise to “internation-
alize” the dissemination of findings (which means publishing
in ISI journals) has increased contributions in English by non-
anglophone anthropologists, but the effort to accomplish this
is considerable and goes generally unrewarded. Hence, the
will to participate in wider conversations may paradoxically
result from an imposition of the hegemonic benchmarking
model.
The three articles presented here come from a US
anthropologist working in Hong Kong for over 20 years,
an Indian anthropologist working in Delhi who has done
fieldwork in Lebanon, and a Brazilian anthropologist both
working and doing research in Brazil. Their experiences of
practicing anthropology are very different, yet they present
important commonalities. The most salient one, I suggest,
is the rejection of a multiculturalist understanding of world
anthropologies that would stress the incommensurability of
different traditions. Instead, these anthropologists express
a will to participate in a single world anthropology, a global
body of knowledge that will engage multisited and histori-
cally embedded theories in an ongoing conversation that will
need to negotiate the power effects of a multipolar world.
ical Sciences (IUAES) had anthropologists from 69 differ-
ent countries. The American Anthropologist now includes a
subsection devoted to world anthropology in every issue;
editorial boards of major journals published in the United
States and Western Europe increasingly consist of anthro-
pologists from around the world. All of this testifies to a
recent explosion of interest in world anthropology as well
as to the globalization of anthropology as a discipline. Ulf
Hannerz (1996) defined “the global ecumene” as a world in
which we all are also increasingly engaging with one another
in a common forum. This is the situation of anthropology
today.
This globalization is inevitably eroding the power of
what has heretofore been the intellectual hegemon. The
more that anthropology is global, the less it is “American”—
that is, from the United States—and, in a broader sense, less
Anglo-American and European American. The leaders of the
American Anthropological Association—its presidents, of-
ficers, and administrators over the past decade—have been
846 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
extraordinarily welcoming toward the emergence of global
anthropology. However, the rank-and-file of US anthropol-
ogists have not been interested. Panels concerning global
anthropology offered at the AAA annual meetings have gen-
erally been sparsely attended over the years as compared, for
example, to similar panels offered at IUAES. This is entirely
understandable—your average graduate student or assistant
professor in the United States probably has more immedi-
ate concerns than global anthropology, namely finding and
keeping a job within the profession. Who can blame them?
But this may be based on a misunderstanding of current
market realities. As the United States sheds anthropologi-
cal positions, East Asia adds them: I know of several dozen
US- or British-trained anthropologists who have been able
to find jobs as anthropologists in East Asia in recent years,
having been unable or unwilling to be employed in the soci-
eties in which they received their anthropological education.
Global anthropology is not only an intellectual movement
but an economic movement as well, as other parts of the
world, such as East Asia, increasingly begin to supersede the
Western world economically.
I am an American by birth and an American anthropol-
ogist by training. I attended graduate school in the United
States, but I have taught in Hong Kong over the past 23
years, and I lived in Japan for some eight years before that.
I am thus in an ambiguous position. My ambivalence is
personal—I have no idea anymore where my home is be-
tween Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States—but it
is also professional. It is rooted in my simultaneous roles
of interpreter of East Asian and US anthropologies to one
another and of gatekeeper, judging East Asian students and
colleagues regarding the anthropological quality of their ef-
forts. This gatekeeper role includes grading students and
considering their research proposals; evaluating the research
proposals and employment, tenure, and promotion applica-
tions of professional anthropologists; and, as an editor of
Asian Anthropology, evaluating submitted articles, through
referees, as to their worthiness for publication. All of these
activities involve me, as a US-trained anthropologist, judging
the quality of the work of anthropologists from other intel-
lectual traditions. If anthropology is indeed one—that is, if
there is a single global anthropology—then my judgment
may be apt. However, if there are multiple global anthro-
pologies, then my judgment, and my capacity for judgment,
is questionable.
On the one hand, when I, as editor for Asian Anthropology,
request that a Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani anthropologist
rewrite a paper, this may represent my effort to make this
paper meet global standards for anthropological publica-
tion; on the other hand, it may represent my imposition of
US standards on other anthropologies—my exercise of US
hegemony. When I tell a mainland Chinese graduate student
in my university that her research proposal is not interesting
and she needs to rethink it, this may represent the universal
training of anthropology graduate students everywhere, or
it may represent my role as a US gatekeeper telling students
from a different intellectual tradition of anthropology that
they had better conform to my norms of anthropology if
they want to succeed in the department of which I am chair.
When I advise a candidate for promotion or tenure that she
had better try to publish more in English in well-known
Western journals, this may represent anthropological com-
mon sense—as well as passing down what is perceived as
common sense by university administrators at my institu-
tion and in Hong Kong at large (see Faure 2001; Math-
ews 2009)—or it may represent the imperialistic enforce-
ment of my own hegemonic standards on younger scholars
for whom these standards may seem distinctly foreign and
unwelcome.
Obviously, both of these positions—that of a single
global anthropology with a single standard of judgment and
that of multiple global anthropologies with multiple stan-
dards of judgment—are to some extent valid. There is a
common global anthropology, or at least aspects of a com-
mon global anthropology, with broadly common ideas of
what the discipline consists of in its premises and methods.
This is why I can teach in Hong Kong with some degree
of confidence. I have never yet had a student or colleague
say, “You can’t understand my vision of what anthropology
is because you are US trained, whereas I was trained else-
where.” (This is partially because so many anthropologists
in Hong Kong have received graduate training in the US
or the UK; in Japan and China, I have indeed received such
responses from a few anthropologists, although certainly not
from most.) I do not believe that this lack of critical response
is only because of false consciousness on the part of my stu-
dents and colleagues. Rather, there really does exist a global
anthropology with standards that, while not uniform and
homogenous, are also not radically disjunctive: worldwide,
we anthropologists are for the most part broadly engaged in
the same common endeavor.
However, there are indeed significant differences in na-
tional traditions: to take just one example of many more that
might be mentioned, Japanese anthropologists are some-
times seen as being wholly immersed in ethnographic data at
the expense of theory, while anthropologists in the United
States, by contrast, may be seen as being obsessed with the-
ory at the expense of ethnography. I have written about “the
referee system as a barrier to global anthropology” (Mathews
2010), and indeed it is a barrier, in the sense that referees,
and teachers too, are gatekeepers enforcing, to at least some
extent, US hegemony. Both of these views—of world an-
thropology, on the one hand, and world anthropologies, on
the other hand—have their legitimacy; the problem is how,
in particular situations and circumstances, these two per-
spectives can be disentangled. I have spent my career trying
to understand this.
World anthropology, based on the idea of a single
global anthropology, necessarily involves a singular vision of
what anthropology is and should be, and this tends to be
Western anthropology, particularly US anthropology. Dif-
ferent anthropologies around the world continue to more or

less take their cues from the theories of US anthropology.
But there are ongoing features of anthropology in the United
States today that make it distinctly unsuitable to be the world
gatekeeper and hegemon of anthropology.
The trend in US anthropology over the past 50 years,
since Clifford Geertz and the postmodern wave that fol-
lowed him, has been to write in a more and more complex
and literary way, one that in its complexity privileges native
writers and speakers of English. This has made US anthropol-
ogy less comprehensible to non-native speakers of English
than it once was and, thus, more provincial (see Ribeiro
2006:377–378 in his discussion of “metropolitan provincial-
ism” in US anthropology). Earlier US anthropologists such
as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Marvin Harris wrote
for a larger audience, but this is generally no longer the case
(albeit with a number of notable exceptions, among them
David Graeber). US cultural anthropology is generally dis-
tinctly harder than in earlier eras for non-native speakers
of English to understand. This is due not simply to trends
within US anthropology itself but also to the tenure sys-
tem, requiring “advances” in theory every few years for a
new generation of junior academics. This is not the case in
many other societies, where academics are granted lifelong
employment upon hiring. Also, because academic publish-
ers and university presses in the United States have enough
readers within the anthropological world itself to make it
largely unnecessary to reach an audience beyond the anthro-
pological world, anthropologists typically do not pursue
such audiences, writing almost entirely for themselves and
their students. This is not the case elsewhere: in societies
without such a large anthropological establishment, anthro-
pologists must write for an audience of scholars in other dis-
ciplines or the general public, or else they will have almost no
readers.
In a globalizing world of globalizing universities, we
are moving away from global anthropologies toward global
anthropology. This is inevitable in the coming decades, I
think, but it will also bring into increasingly sharp relief the
conflicts of evaluation that I earlier described. One can only
hope for the emergence of a global anthropology based not
in native-speaker English but in universal English, enabling
more and more of the world’s anthropologists to communi-
cate with one another. One can also hope that world stan-
World Anthropology 847
dards of anthropological citation will become ever broader,
leading citation indexes such as the SSCI (Social Sciences
Citation Index) to increasingly represent not just the West
but the world, as is resoundingly not the case at present
(Mathews 2015:368). I am convinced, because of the West’s
relative economic decline—leading gradually and indirectly
but inescapably to the relative decline of Western and US
anthropology as well—that other anthropologies, particu-
larly those of East Asia but of a range of other societies
as well, will increasingly contest US anthropological world
hegemony.
We now live in a multipolar world of political power,
and we will increasingly live in a multipolar world of an-
thropological power and influence. This calls for a world
anthropology more than world anthropologies—but it will
involve a range of competing anthropological centers, allow-
ing for far more diversity than we currently foster. We will
indeed come to live in a global anthropological ecumene,
as is only beginning today but will definitely be the case in
decades to come. This, I think, will be a far better anthro-
pological world than today, and I look forward to seeing its
ongoing emergence.
REFERENCES CITED
Faure, David
2001 Higher Education Reform and Intellectual Schizophrenia
in Hong Kong. Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies
8(December):80–85.
Hannerz, Ulf
1996 Transnational Connections. London: Routledge.
Mathews, Gordon
2009 Hong Kong Chinese Professors within the “Western” Uni-
versity Model. In Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism
and the Professoriate. Gregory S. Poole and Ya-chen Chen,
eds. Pp. 99–106. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense.
2010 On the Referee System as a Barrier to Global Anthropology.
The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(1):52–63.
2015 East Asian Anthropology in the World. American Anthro-
pologist 117(2):364–383.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins
2006 World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Sce-
nario in Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 26(4):363–
386.
848 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the
Mediation Processes
Article
Anthropologizing the World and Worlding the
Anthropologist
Yasmeen Arif
Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, India
In anthropology’s immense archive, the geographical catalog
is a significant one. This catalog has mapped the anthropolo-
gist onto specific geographical localized specializations, and
over time it has added the contours of the global and the
planetary as well. In that movement between the local and
planetary, the discipline and its foot soldiers have sensed
a politics as much as a challenge in knowledge production
practices—in empirical, conceptual, and institutional terms.
At this time, that challenge seems to formulate itself thus: on
the one hand, how does a geographically located discipline
encompass the planet (“anthropologize the world”) and, on
the other hand, what is the imagination of a geographical
“world” for a located anthropologist (“worlding the anthro-
pologist”)? Direct as that double articulation may seem, I
do not intend to simplify, for instance, the complexity of
how ethnographically located epistemologies negotiate the
issues of universalizing theory or how anthropological issues
no longer remain located (cf. Arif 2015). But then, these
are not new problems. Critical anthropology has certainly
addressed them; however, I reiterate them here in order to
provide a milieu for the queries and responses I develop in
what follows.
“Anthropologizing the World and Worlding the An-
thropologist” is thus a phrasing that emerges from the title of
the 2015 AAA roundtable: “Between World Anthropologies
and World Anthropology.” First, “World Anthropologies”
commemorates the publication, ten years ago, of Arturo
Escobar and Gustavo Ribeiro’s edited volume of the same
name (Escobar and Ribeiro 2006) and the concerns of anthro-
pological knowledge production that the volume brought
into focus. From that volume, I retain the importance of
engaging with both the intellectual and political project of
pluralizing anthropology. Second, “World Anthropology,”
the title of this section of American Anthropologist (AA), un-
derlines a label that I use (with some extrapolation) to frame
a disciplinary coherence for an anthropology of an intercon-
nected world. This is a coherence that I seek to excavate
from the pluralized horizon of anthropologies in order to
propose an analytical distance, but not a separation, from the
politics, pluralities, and inequities of its global institutional
mapping. In both of these threads, this discussion learns from
the immeasurable diversity of issues that both of the above
formulations have expressed, and at the least, it will be hard
to disentangle my issues from those that came before. My
issues are endorsements, largely, of those positions as much
as they are overlaps.
A brief note on my “location”—I teach in India in a
department of sociology and was trained there as well in
traditions conventionally belonging to sociology and socio-
cultural anthropology, and while both features signal par-
ticularities of institutional history and intellectual profile,
my trajectories have been somewhat atypical. My disserta-
tion fieldwork was located in another region of the “Global
South” (Lebanon), and my work since then has covered
India, Africa, and Lebanon. My research commitments are
in questions of violence, in queries of life and affect, and
in studies of the urban, money, and a few other concerns.
For more than a decade, I have been engaged as a contribut-
ing member of the WAN, the World Anthropologies Net-
work (http://www.ram-wan.net), and I have written about
world anthropologies and world anthropology in relation to
questions of history, theory, philosophy, and epistemology
in anthropology.
* * * * *
The roundtable hosted at the 2015 AAA Annual Meeting in
Denver, Colorado, interrogated the internationalization of
anthropology in a two-part question (see Narotzky, this is-
sue), and I interpret those parts here as underscoring a basic
query: What does it mean to separate and connect world an-
thropologies and world anthropology? The “World Anthro-
pology” section in American Anthropologist, initiated in 2014,
provides a backdrop for an engagement. I cannot adequately
summarize the enormous wealth of information, views and
perspectives, passions and politics, and power and position-
ings that have been written about by many anthropologists
covering a potentially infinite range of nuance and concern
in the last couple of years. Bringing them to this platform of
visibility is an achievement, a signal of world anthropology’s
coming of age. Yet, if I were to place these essays in front of
that mirror we know from fairy tales—the one that is able to
reflect how things really look—I would have to speak about
a slight sense of déjà vu (quite like the child that saw the
naked emperor and uttered the unsayable). The reflection
that I find (yet again) is the area studies paradigm. The clas-
sificatory system of world anthropology has an undeniable
resonance with that of area studies. We discuss countries,
for example: Ireland, Argentina, or Mexico. We recognize
regions: South Asia, Latin America, East Asia, and so on.

Within those locations, we certainly understand a range of
topics of research or issues of concern: language, identity,
folklore, colonialism, and globalization, as well as history,
hegemony, dominance, and the metropole. This is a reduc-
tion, yet it illustrates how anthropology has not taken us
far from the cartographic imaginations that the area studies
paradigm spawned.
Regions, countries, and locations design the boxes in
which we pack anthropological knowledge. Ethnographic
fieldwork itself is a located exercise that structures
anthropological ontology. Anthropological work is about
embedded locations in “areas” or “regions” that have their
meanings captured in the specificities that anthropologists
typically frame as cultural, political, economic, and social.
The salience of those factors remains without question.
However, a “World” anthropology that imagines an inter-
connected planet invokes the complementary question of
where anthropologists are to be located in an epistemological
cartography and in an ethnographic imagination that circum-
scribes a mesh-worked world. To be sure, anthropology
has long approached global interconnections and planetary
links. In all respects, without a sense of a planetary imagina-
tion, the economies, politics, cultures, and socialities of the
contemporary can hardly be reckoned with. But imagining
an ethnography of the world requires rethinking the
cartography that situates an anthropological ontology and,
more specifically, the positioning of anthropologists in that
cartography.
For concerns limited to this article, the problem is a
transparent one. We are now imagining a global stage where
neither the major characters nor the script has really changed.
Increasingly, however, localized anthropologists are called
upon to play marginal or “supporting” roles. That is, out-
side of the hegemonic centers, anthropologists are mostly
called upon to provide supporting ethnographic fill to bolster
metropolitan theory. Critique—not just opposition, which
can change the terms of that theory—is also a privilege often
protected within the metropole, again to be supported by the
outside. Jacques Derrida’s (Derrida and Steigler 2002:93–
94) words below suggest for us a nuanced reading of a
familiar set of words—testimony and evidence—in order to
lay bare the relationship between world anthropology and
world anthropologies:
A testimony has never been or should never be mistaken for
evidence. Testimony, in the strict sense of the term, is advanced
in the first person by someone who says, “I swear,” who pledges
to tell the truth, gives his word, and asks to be taken at his word
in a situation where nothing has been proven—where nothing
will ever be proven, for structural reasons, for reasons that are
essential and not contingent. It is possible for testimony to be
corroborated by evidence, but the process of evidence is absolutely
heterogeneous to that of testimony, which implies faith, belief,
sworn faith, the pledge to tell the truth, the “I swear to tell the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
I suggest that what is regarded as anthropological ev-
idence, which for me encompasses theory as well as the
World Anthropology 849
empirical that grounds theory, is still largely generated in
the metropolitan centers.1 This power to create evidence is
the power to dictate what Anthropology (with a capital “A”)
is, its correctness and truth value, who speaks for the disci-
pline and who does not, who will critique it (and how) and
who must not, how roles are to be cast and played, and how
others are to be structurally recognized and positioned—for
example, as the subaltern, the native, the authentic, the ex-
pert, and the anthropologist of and from the “Global South.”
The choice of evidence that a disciplinary journal (like AA)
publishes is taken as given and technically correct. To this ev-
idence, the other world anthropologists may pose their testi-
monials. This is reminiscent of our disciplinary past when pe-
ripheral anthropologists were (and are) often treated as “na-
tive informants” whose work, while providing testimony to
bolster the theories emanating from the centers, cannot per
se participate in theorizing. Concepts that will give meaning
to description must always emerge from a centered thinking
(and I might add, from those who are also located in the cen-
ter). Conversely, “appointing” the native as expert does not
necessarily address the problem of what world anthropology
could or should be—oppositional positioning is not what I
suggest here. The effect for the decentered anthropologist,
whose scholarship is taken as testimonial and not evidence,
is constant negotiation with faith, with “truth telling,” and
with appeals to credibility—and that testimonial divide is a
problem that needs attention. How can peripheral anthro-
pologists be anthropologists without iterating the evidence
is the core of that problem. That is why I still insist on taking
a fresh look at the kinds of subject positions that are being
cast when international anthropology mirrors area studies.
Anthropology seems destined to treat geographical lo-
cality as the ontological ground that leads to classifications
even when its horizons become necessarily international.
World anthropology must be world anthropologies, where
the plural is a list of insurmountable borders and stark
outlines. There are structural reasons for this, as Derrida
states above, “reasons that are essential and not contin-
gent.” Most fundamentally, the located anthropologist who
works outside the centers is mapped—that is, geographically
essentialized.2 I question how much of those essentialized
histories are informing the geographies of the future, and
that is why I ask for another glance at what epistemological
“identity” stereotypes are continuing to be sustained and
what else might be created. Though many of them emerge
out of the ressentiment of wounded peripheries or identi-
ties, it would be useful to reflect on whether or not we
are quickly being co-opted and turned into a roster of pre-
given stereotypes while we scramble for citizenship in world
anthropology. The challenge for me is not so much the cre-
ation of a world map of contiguous but separate territories
but, rather, the issue of sharing a common discipline that
can work without a built-in sense of hierarchy and yet be
sensitive to how the world map now stands in terms of the is-
sues and research plans that fuel anthropological knowledge
production.
850 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
* * * * *
This inevitably draws me to the grand question: What is
world anthropology? Why is it necessary that there be a
separate section of an established journal in the discipline to
identify this paradigm? One answer is that this section comes
out of a political recognition of the disparities involved in
anthropological knowledge production. Or, perhaps, this
section can begin to answer questions like the following:
How do we craft an object of inquiry called world anthro-
pology relevant to the discipline in the contemporary? What
subject matter or research agendas capture the sense of lived
life emerging on a horizon that differs from our conven-
tional landscapes? What theories, methods, epistemologies,
and politics are most equitable and suited to the task? How
do we move on from the area studies paradigm, or what
is the project of world anthropology in this vista, and how
do we frame the interactions and collaborations that this
horizon makes possible (cf. Arif 2015)?
Tracing the above contours in the negotiation between
world anthropology and world anthropologies, I turn to the
concern embedded in the second query that the roundtable
prompted: namely, knowledge and power in the interna-
tionalization process. While we find our places on a global
map and learn to construct a world anthropology that re-
sponds to the contemporary, how do we bring the world
into our classroom? How do we find our classificatory posi-
tions in terms of world anthropology? Keeping in mind the
same tropes of testimony and evidence, imagine a classroom
in an American or Northern university (and a few select
ones in the “South”), a room full of students from across the
world learning from the comprehensive syllabus on Anthro-
pology with a capital A (the evidence I mentioned earlier
alongside the testimonials from various locations) and then
proceeding outward to the world, some returning to their
own territories while others travel far, fitted with appro-
priate language training, area-focused research proposals,
and reading lists. All seek to contribute to Anthropology
with a capital A. Meanwhile I, in my classroom, speak to
many, but they are almost always from India. Most will stay,
study, and work in India, by choice, necessity, or lack of
opportunity and funding to travel outside for training or re-
search. Do I treat Anthropology with a capital A as evidence
and provide local knowledges as testimony to Anthropol-
ogy? Will I be a local hero if I teach Gandhi, incorporate
the Vedas, or read indigenous or “foreign” anthropologists
on localized topics in India, pay some selective attention
to relatable ethnographies, and turn my back on the theo-
rists from the metropoles? In everyday practice, like most
in similar positions, I combine all of these perspectives but,
whichever way I turn, I hear the insistence of Derrida’s words
again, “I do not wish to transform myself into a diaphanous
mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy” (Derrida 1988:4) if that
pedagogy makes an eternal classification of periphery and
center.
I am drawing attention to the question of pedagogy as
one aspect of the tension between world anthropologies and
world anthropology in order to understand it, reflexively and
expansively, and to craft and sustain an inclusive, integrated
discipline and not a fragmented, disintegrated intent. In my
classroom, I would want to think about and also convey
the place(s) that method and epistemology have in creating
the knowledges and theories that I discuss and that I aspire
to make in what we can call anthropological knowledge.
This is not knowledge that should be just another utterance
in a cacophony of voices and languages, nor should it be a
dilution of integrity (or quality) in the name of multiplicity. It
should certainly not be a “diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal
pedagogy.”3
The postcolonial spaces we inhabit are aspirational
spaces in which some of us insist on the right and respon-
sibility to articulate knowledge claims, more so in univer-
sities than in other places. These are spaces in which we
ought to have faded away self–other binaries such as center–
periphery, colonizer–colonized, and hegemonic–resistant
that prevail upon us in this paradigm. These are spaces in
which we could try to envision a relationship of other to
other or, in more self-respecting ways, that of self to self.
Through our scholarship and our pedagogies, we seek to
hear, learn, know, and then speak. Most of all, we speak in
order to know who will hear—namely, who our audience
might be, who our collaborator might be, and who our stu-
dent might be. To know our audience would mean claiming
the privilege of speaking and that would imply the power
and privilege of choice in what we can teach and speak about.
Apart from the ignominies that market sensitivities and
dictums from on high have placed on professional and in-
stitutional lives, it is not an unimportant concern that we
need to question anthropological syllabi, too. We need to
look at their tenets and evidence in the same way we con-
sider the politics and positionings of anthropological knowl-
edge production. As we consider our discipline’s future, it
would seem necessary, if not urgent, to engage with how
the “world” now presents itself as an ethnographic horizon. I
imagine that location will remain salient and that it will need
to remain salient. I admit that it is probably my work in af-
fect, violence, and life that gives me the necessary support to
speak of an anthropology of the world. But I suspect that the
language of humanity, technology, money, life, law, ethics,
suffering, and emotions (to mention just a few) will appear
again as concepts that demand a worlding of the anthropol-
ogist. The classroom will have to be the significant place
where these internationalizations and worldings take place.
They will have to be the located places in, and from which,
to embed the space of the world. At the same time, it will
be important to imagine a “world and worldly” audience of
readers and listeners who are not mapped onto essentialized
categories.
To end this brief reflection, I again emphasize the need to
feel the texture of the anthropological fabric that the relation-
ship between world anthropology and world anthropologies
weaves and, in that fabric, the need to unravel threads that
might still be making its pattern. In other words, my intent

in this article is to underscore the theme of the AAA 2015 in
Denver (and that of Minneapolis 2016), where evidence and
testimony do not dictate the negotiations of the strange and
familiar—where the relationship of “familiar” to “strange” is
not a slash but a hyphen, not a separation but an ensemble.
* * * * *
NOTES
1. I note that the official theme of the AAA 2016 Annual Meetings
focuses on “evidence.” Perhaps we can paint a picture of evidence
with the colors of my intonations mentioned above, too. I thank
Emily Metzner for pointing out this potentially fertile connection.
2. A small but potent example is when anthropologists outside the
center are referred to with a qualifier like “Indian,” “Latin Amer-
ican,” or “African.”
3. The important question of English as the possible lingua franca of
anthropology is a troubling one. The follies of the colonial past are
many and, while language troubles are some of them, I would still
abide by a language that allows me to speak to, listen, read, and
Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique
of the Mediation Processes
Articles
On the Construction of (a) World Anthropology(ies): A View
from Brazil
Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima
Professor of Ethnology at the National Museum, Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Reflections regarding the role played by the World Coun-
cil of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) in structur-
ing an “international circuit” of (national) anthropological
associations seem to me to be opportune and necessary.
The project of the council is the dissemination of a more
symmetrical and pluralistic view of world anthropologies.
The number of affiliated anthropological associations has
more than doubled during 12 years of the WCAA’s exis-
tence. World anthropologies evidently exist within global
and local economic, political, cultural, and ideological, as
well as institutional, frames that have changed substantially
within this span of time. I situate my views in a Brazilian
perspective, considering aspects of change at the national
scale.
If we follow Susana Narotzky’s lead, we should be ad-
dressing the effects of intra-associational power (such as
within the AAA). What sorts of anthropological produc-
tion and anthropologists are found within these associations?
Who seeks to have their production recognized as part of the
scope of world anthropology(ies)? What sort of globaliza-
tion is possible and effectively desired (and by whom)? What
World Anthropology 851
learn from as many as possible. Just in India alone, where many
languages are spoken, I wonder what language I could choose as
a reasonable representation.
REFERENCES CITED
Arif, Yasmeen
2015 The Audacity of Method. Economic and Political Weekly
50(1):53–61.
Derrida, Jaques
1988 Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Pol-
itics of the Proper Name. In The Ear of the Other: Otobi-
ography, Transference, Translation. Christie Macdonald, ed.
Avitell Ronell, trans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Steigler
2002 Echographies of Television. Jennifer Bajorek, trans. Pp.
93–94. Cambridge: Polity.
Escobar, Arturo, and Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
2006 World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within
Systems of Power. New York: Berg.
other projects are in dialogue? Sandra López Varela (2015)
quite effectively called attention to the presuppositions and
consequences of internationalization as another key element
of the debate, and it is on her work that I base my discussion
of internationalization. The widespread use of the term in
polysemic ways prevents dialogue and promotes a false and
homogenized interpretation of this social phenomenon, but
following López Varela’s reflexive approach has much to
offer.
A (SPECIFIC) BRAZILIAN PERSPECTIVE
ON (NON)INTERNATIONALIZATION
I was trained in Brazil, my home country, and have conducted
almost all of my research here as well. As a result, I am not
exactly well positioned to act as a mediator between scien-
tific communities, whether Brazilian and US, Brazilian and
European, Brazilian and African, or Brazilian and Asian. Like
many other researchers, however, I have long had contacts
with colleagues in other countries and, indeed, throughout
Brazil, which is in and of itself a very diverse place. In the
1980s, I began studying Brazilian state formation through
indigenist policies and internal processes of colonialism and
imperialism and examining the role of Brazilian anthropol-
ogy in nation-building processes (Souza Lima 1991, 2005;
cf. Peirano 1981, 1991, 1998, 2004, 2005, 2008a, 2008b).
852 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
But my reflections can only be adequately situated if I talk
about my engagement, alongside that of my professors and
colleagues, in the radical critique of the military dictatorship
that then ruled Brazil and in the struggle to re-democratize
our country (Souza Lima 2004). I am conscious of the fact,
however, that my work has had little to no impact on the
discipline’s international circles for several reasons.
Some of these reasons have to do with language and
the costs of translation. English is today the world’s “lingua
franca,” or the “language of empire.” Brazilian anthropology
has never had systematic funding allocated to translation.
Other reasons involve the costs—in time and resources—of
attending international events. Scholars from abroad often
find they require a sort of academic (re)socialization to be
recognized within US and European spaces. Indeed, we need
to learn the habitus of these spaces as well as the “proper”
and “appropriate” forms of self-presentation within them,
both orally and textually.
Moreover, internationalization was not a priority for me
personally. I didn’t systematically seek to establish relation-
ships with researchers in the United States, Canada, France
(a privileged locus for Brazilian academics), or England. My
relationships with researchers from these countries were
created as a consequence of my research within a broader
framework of internationalization that took place in Brazil as
part of the financing objectives of postgraduate studies and
research. Thus, as with so many of my generation, inser-
tion in networks of “balanced exchange” with anthropolo-
gists of other countries (either intentionally or as a “natural
effect” of certain patterns of interaction) was itself a circum-
stantial effect of how anthropology was being produced in
Brazil.
In the 1980s, it was quite commonplace for those of us
situated in the nation’s internal hegemonic centers of learn-
ing (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and later Brası́lia) to be wholly
trained in Brazil, while colleagues from nonhegemonic in-
stitutions and regions were generally trained outside the
country. Not all of these foreign-trained anthropologists,
however, became part of bi- or multinational networks.
None of us were obliged to do this in Brazil, and there was
much that needed to be done internally in order to stabilize
anthropology as a field of scientific knowledge in Brazil. No
matter how much we consumed (and still consume) other
anthropologies, particularly the hegemonic anthropologies
of the Global North, we were conscious of the fact that our
training in Brazil was comparable in quality to that offered by
the centers of the discipline overseas. However, even though
many of Brazil’s foreign-trained anthropologists have repeat-
edly returned to their alma maters, they have generally not
had their own production duly recognized by these institu-
tions either, still being perceived as “subaltern” practitioners
of the discipline.
A wider and more symmetrical circulation of certain
anthropologists, stretching beyond national boundaries or
thematic enclaves, has come about only as a result of the
above-mentioned resocialization, the systematic cultivation
of relationships, and a recurrent presence in the “hegemonic
centers” (in institutions, networks, and journals). Rarely is
the anthropological production from nonhegemonic centers
incorporated as a contribution to the general anthropolog-
ical theoretical corpus (but see Oliveira 2008 for a dense
and critical evaluation of this type of approach). More often,
and influenced by the remains of the area studies perspec-
tive, a colonial subfield of anthropology, anthropological
production from nonhegemonic centers is incorporated as
ethnographic data. In this case, the author presents herself
as the “discoverer” of an intrinsic facet of the social life of
the peoples of a given region of the planet, a facet that is
then placed into dialogue with theories developed by other
researchers of the same area and that is portrayed as a sin-
gularity that may be generalized. Authors who follow this
path in search of recognition in the hegemonic centers are
often stripped of their ethnographic data, making it speak
with a degree of generality that transforms their theories
from “native theory” to that of “theory built on natives” (or,
as is probably more fashionable today, “theory built with
natives,” although coauthorship is not granted). Without
such investments, publications translated into English, an
expensive task, can become obsolete. In these and other
ways, many Brazilian researchers have managed to situate
themselves in international research circuits and debates in
anthropology and sociology.
Factors related to the hierarchies of legitimacy and
adequate objects of investigation within each national an-
thropological context must also be taken into account.
As a nonhegemonic center, the anthropological field in
Brazil has often only belatedly recognized and legitimized
the work of those Brazilian anthropologists who fled
from internationally dominant canons. This was the case
even when they were in direct dialogue with the so-
cial groups under investigation and with intellectuals in
other countries who also only had their works gain greater
recognition at a later date. In truth, I dare say, few
Brazilian anthropologists have had their work widely rec-
ognized within the discipline’s mainstream, in spite of inter-
national relations.
FORMS OF INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS: ONE
KIND OF INTERNATIONALIZATION
Brazilian anthropology connected with nonhegemonic an-
thropologies on two occasions prior to the creation of the
WCAA. The construction of deep networks of relationships
between Brazilian and Argentinian anthropologists intensi-
fied when Argentinian researchers migrated to Brazil in the
1970s to escape the military dictatorship in their country.
They studied in Brazilian institutions of higher education,
where they completed undergraduate and graduate degrees
and where some of them subsequently pursued careers. In
the 1980s, the Post Graduate Program in Social Anthropol-
ogy/National Museum-UFRJ (PPGAS/MN) of Brazil part-
nered with the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) to offer
MA and PhD entrance exams for the Graduate Program

in Social Anthropology/National Museum to undergradu-
ate students at UBA. This has resulted in a steady stream
of Argentinian researchers moving through the National
Museum, a flow that has continued even after the agree-
ment lapsed. In fact, it has expanded to other institutions.
In the same period, the Brazilian Anthropological Associ-
ation (ABA) organized regional anthropology conferences,
such as ABA-South that in 1991 became an independent
biennial meeting, organized by the anthropological insti-
tutions of the Mercosur countries. The Mercosur Anthro-
pology Meeting (Reunión de Antropologı́a del Mercosur,
RAM) held its 11th biannual conference in 2015 in Montev-
ideo. RAM meetings are spaces for engaging in dialogue and
building relationships that may be strengthened by funding
for networked projects undertaken with partner countries.
Today many Brazilian anthropologists do research through-
out the region—but especially in Argentina. This has en-
sured a shared and symmetrical space for anthropological
production.
More recently, Brazilian and Portuguese anthropolo-
gists came together under an initiative of João Pacheco de
Oliveira, then-president of ABA (1994–1996), who orga-
nized, in close dialogue with Cristiana Bastos, a seminar in
Rio de Janeiro that included large numbers of Portuguese
anthropologists. Some of these scholars, such as Miguel Vale
de Almeida and João de Pina-Cabral, would later under-
take research in Brazil. This event was inspired by research
done by Portuguese anthropologists in Brazil, such as Cris-
tiana Bastos, and Brazilian anthropologists who researched
Portugal, such as Bela Feldman-Bianco and Omar Ribeiro
Thomaz.4 The Luso-African-Brazilian Social Science Confer-
ences, which began in 1990 in Coimbra, Portugal, actually
preceded this initiative.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO
INTERNATIONALIZATION
The same year the WCAA was created (2004), during Gus-
tavo Lins Ribeiro’s tenure as head of ABA (2002–2004),
ABA launched the Virtual Brazilian Anthropology (Vibrant)
journal. Its explicit purpose was to disseminate Brazilian
anthropology internationally through translation of Brazil-
ian texts into other languages (mostly into English, Spanish,
and French). Its effect on Brazilian anthropology greatly
exceeded that achieved by institutional associations. It was
a great success in its attempt to overcome language barri-
ers and culturalist regionalization, and it enabled inclusive
transnational dialogues and intellectual socialization beyond
Brazil’s borders. The creation of Vibrant also anticipated
what governmental funding agencies in Brazil would later
demand: international connections and publications. This
gave Brazilian anthropology a good leg up on much of the
rest of our country’s academic scene in an age of increasingly
compulsory internationalization.5
The training of professors and researchers in hegemonic
countries and frequent visits by foreign speakers have long
been some of the main criteria used by Brazilian government
World Anthropology 853
agencies to assess Brazilian institutions’ levels of interna-
tionalization. Over the last decade, however, these criteria
have changed. The presence of foreign students attending
graduate school in Brazil and, especially, publication in for-
eign language books and journals evaluated by government
funding agencies as “international” have become the most
important indexes those agencies use to qualify a given in-
stitution and its programs as "internationalized." In Brazil,
as elsewhere in the world, these criteria have begun to
gain overwhelming importance in the institutional evaluation
process.
In the particular case of anthropology, nowadays the
criteria currently used by Brazilian governmental agencies
and potential donors as signs of internationalization include
ethnographic research conducted outside Brazil and the es-
tablishment of research projects and networks consisting of
researchers from at least two different countries. Being able
to show this sort of “internationalization” is what leads to
getting the highest marks in performance evaluations car-
ried out by government agencies, and this, in turn, results
in access to greater resources.
By taking these steps, largely under pressure of Brazil’s
scientific research funding establishment, and by establish-
ing new relationships of exchange and shared production,
Brazilian anthropology has stretched beyond simple partic-
ipation in international meetings and events. It has begun
to establish denser bi- or multilateral contacts outside of
Brazil. It is in this general scenario that ABA’s presidents
have participated in the WCAA.
THE WAN, THE WCAA, AND BEYOND
The World Anthropologies Network (Red de Antropologı́as
del Mundo, http://www.ram-wan.net/) has sought to chal-
lenge the hegemonic role played by the former colonial
metropolitan and US anthropologies by fostering a plural-
istic and heteroglossic anthropological scene through coali-
tion and the exploration of new political-epistemological
possibilities (Ribeiro 2006; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). This
movement has gained strength through the leadership of
researchers who are situated outside of the United States
but who were often trained at doctoral programs in anthro-
pology within the United States. A key moment for this
movement was the establishment of the World Council of
Anthropological Associations during the meeting of the ABA
in Recife in 2004.
I believe that the movement launched by the World
Anthropologies Network, together with the WCAA, has
been very important and has helped lead to the creation of
the AAA’s Committee on World Anthropologies (CWA).
Solidarity among associations and the formation of joint po-
sitions regarding questions that have come up in various
countries have effectively demonstrated that the WCAA
has fulfilled its role as a macroinstitution linking national
associations. What it has not done, however, is to cre-
ate effective changes in epistemologies or in the balance
of symbolic power between the anthropological production
854 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
of hegemonic and nonhegemonic members, even within
its members’ national contexts. If anthropological associa-
tions share a global stage more often today, with researchers
and research projects moving with greater ease among na-
tions and growing transnational interdependence in the pro-
duction of anthropology, this is, I believe, mostly due to
mounting global pressures for internationalization. Interna-
tionalization, however, does not necessarily result in a more
equitable distribution of anthropological power. A decade
is not enough time for a small group of actors to put in
place enormous changes (even within the narrow field of
anthropology) and, through said changes, to overcome dis-
parities, especially across different national anthropologies
in their national contexts and in the global division of labor
and power among nations and among anthropologies. Nev-
ertheless, Gordon Mathews (this issue) has shown us how
much has already been done. The World Anthropologies
roundtable at the 2015 AAA meeting in Denver that spurred
this series of articles and the World Anthropology section
of American Anthropologist in which they appear are clearly
manifestations of these first steps.
Thinking about the situation from a Brazilian perspec-
tive, I am under the impression that the WAN began with
a strong intellectual drive. As an institutional space within
which national associations of anthropology are supposed to
meet to pursue similar objectives, and largely due to its ex-
pansion from 14 to 49 associations, the WCAA leadership
has been mostly dealing with operational and institutional
challenges and has been doing so on a voluntary basis, on top
of demanding academic posts. How to maintain and expand
this critical coalition in the face of a growing crisis of interna-
tionalization and lack of resources is a challenge that must be
met organizationally, theoretically, and epistemologically.
It will be necessary for us to go beyond the standard reflec-
tions and begin working with common research agendas.
We need to engage and integrate students and professionals
from multiple nations in these projects, taking as our cue the
global ecumenical trend currently being preached by mul-
tilateral institutions and international technical cooperation
programs in developing transnational corporations. This has
to be done both in the hegemonic centers of decision making
and in the places where the rubber meets the road, so to
speak. This engagement and cooperation should not only
take in the selection and investigation of research objects but
also involve the intersection of critiques and dialogues with
activism.
Finally, let me say that if ethnography is the main force
for change and theory in our discipline, perhaps these new
movements will be important for the development of pluri-
national and collaborative ethnography. We can see some
of these mechanisms already functioning in large projects
undertaken with EU financial support and, thus, foresee fu-
ture possibilities for these on a more global scale. But for
all this to work out, we must first surmount some of the
real obstacles to these projects—which always comes back
to financing and sponsorship.
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I’d like to thank Susana Narotzky for her in-
vitation to participate in the stimulating roundtable that she organized
during the 144th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association: “Between World Anthropologies and World Anthro-
pology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes.” I
would also like to thank Bela Feldman for suggesting me as a pos-
sible roundtable participant, Monica Heller for the AAA’s support,
and Carla Fernandez for providing last-minute aid before my presen-
tation. Also, I am extremely grateful to Susana Narotzky, Virginia
Dominguez, and Emily Metzner for their careful and generous read-
ing and editing of the text, first translated into English by Thaddeus
Gregory Blanchette.
1. Both Feldman-Bianco and Bastos did their doctorates in the United
States. To see some of their shared work from later years, consult
Bastos et al. 2002.
2. Vibrant has been produced with resources ceded by the Brazilian
government’s support for scientific journals. Toward the end of
2015, in spite of its unquestionable success and its role in in-
ternationally disseminating the anthropology produced in Brazil,
Vibrant had its financing cut due to a supposedly technical prob-
lem: the journal was not indexed in ISI-Web of Knowledge or in
Scopus, a criterion that was waived for other Brazilian journals.
Vibrant is currently in the process of being indexed, but the delay
is enormous. What resources are available are very limited, in
any case, and continued publication of the journal wouldn’t be
possible without the inestimable dedication of its principal edi-
tor, Peter Fry (and the no less important fact that he is an English
anthropologist living in Brazil since the 1970s), and of Carmen
Rial, aside from ABA support and contributions. Through a call
for aid, it received (as in other situations) numerous letters of sup-
port and temporary financial aid from Critique of Anthropology, via
the good services of Stephen Nugent. This has been an example of
the more important aspects of Brazilian anthropology’s recent
global interconnectedness, which has deepened with Carmen
Rial’s important participation in publishing WCAA’s quarterly
newsletter.
REFERENCES CITED
Bastos, Cristiana, Miguel Vale de Almeida, and Bela Feldman-
Bianco, eds.
2002 Trânsitos coloniais: Diálogos crı́ticos Luso-Brasileiros [Colo-
nial transits: Critical Luso-Brazilian dialogues]. Lisbon: Im-
prensa de Ciências Sociais.
López Varela, Sandra L.
2015 Internationalization for Economic Growth: Aspiring to a
World-Class Mexican Research and Education Environment.
American Anthropologist 117(4):768–776.
Oliveira, Luis Roberto Cardoso de
2008 Dialogical and Power Differences in World Anthropologies.
Vibrant 5(2):268–276.
Peirano, Mariza
1981 The Anthropology of Anthropology: The Brazilian case.
PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard
University.

1991 The Anthropology of Anthropology: The Brazilian Case.
Série Antropologia 110 [Anthropology Series 110]. Brası́lia:
University of Brası́lia.
1998 When Anthropology Is at Home: The Different Contexts of
a Single Discipline. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:105–
129.
2004 “In This Context”: The Many Histories of Anthropology.
Série Antropologia 352 [Anthropology Series 352]. Brası́lia:
University of Brası́lia.
2005 A Guide to Anthropology in Brazil. Vibrant 2(1):54–87.
2008a Brazil: Otherness in Context. In A Companion to Latin
American Anthropology. Deborah A. Poole, ed. Pp. 56–71.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
2008b Anthropology with No Guilt—A View from Brazil. In
Other People’s Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practice on the
Margins. Aleksander Bošković, ed. Pp. 186–198. New York:
Berghahn.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins
2006 Antropologias mundiais: Para um novo cenário global
Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique
of the Mediation Processes
Comment
Anthropology as Discursive Space
Monica Heller
University of Toronto
This collection of articles raises some important questions
and identifies some important gaps. The questions it raises
are at the core of the problematics of world anthropology or
anthropologies—and so, I will argue, are the gaps. But let’s
tackle the questions first.
The first question has to do with the tension between
the singular anthropology and the plural anthropologies; this is,
indeed, the central point of Susana Narotzky’s introduction.
To what extent can we—and should we—be orienting our
efforts to building a discursive field that bridges difference?
Should we instead be trying to find ways of recognizing
forms of knowledge (and modes of knowledge production)
that may well be incommensurable and possibly conflicting?
The first, as Gordon Mathews poignantly notes, risks turn-
ing a movement that is meant to decolonize into one that is
all about gatekeeping. This is, of course, inevitable in any
effort to define a common frame: someone’s idea of what
counts as anthropology ends up being institutionalized, as
does someone’s idea of what counts as a good way to ex-
press and debate anthropological knowledge. The second
risks depriving us of access to what arguably counts most in
anthropology: ways of being in the world that most of us had
no idea existed or could exist.
World Anthropology 855
na antropologia [World anthropologies: Toward a new
global stage in anthropology]. Revista Brasileira de Ciências
Sociais [Brazilian Journal of Social Sciences] 21(60):147–
185.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, and Arturo Escobar, eds.
2006 World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within
Systems of Power. London: Berg.
Souza Lima, Antonio Carlos de
1991 On Indigenism and Nationality in Brazil. In Nation-States
and Indians in Latin America. Greg Urban and Joel Sherzer,
eds. Pp. 237–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.
2004 Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples in Brazil: Ethical En-
gagement and Social Intervention. Practicing Anthropology
26(3):10–14.
2005 Indigenism in Brazil: The International Migration of State
Politics. In Empires, Natives and Nations: Anthropology and
State-Making. Benoı̂t de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and
Lygia Sigaud, eds. Pp. 196–222. Durham: Duke University
Press.
The tension between the two opens up a space for re-
flection. If we can accept that discursive production (in this
case, production of anthropology as a discursive space) is
always going to have to deal with real-world inequalities,
then perhaps our attention ought to be focused on managing
those inequalities. We might just have to be content with
the in-between space of struggle. Or, better, we can see
building a space to struggle as a positive contribution not
only to the decolonization of knowledge and of knowledge
production but also to understanding the conditions of in-
equality that make decolonization necessary both for social
justice purposes and for the realization of the full potential
of the discipline.
Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima offers one path in this
direction: pick a research agenda, any research agenda, and
try to make it work. Stop focusing on the institutionalization
of world “anthropology” or “anthropologies” (as important
a step as that has been) and turn it to some substantive
objective—to answering some shared question. See what
happens, and struggle with it. Meanwhile, Yasmeen Arif of-
fers two paths. The first is to use teaching as a way to bring
new voices and positionalities to bear on what we might want
to imagine anthropology could be. Teaching, she argues,
allows for the locating within fields of power/knowledge
that a good struggle needs to understand and take into ac-
count. (I think research does that as well, if perhaps slightly
856 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
differently, but that is open for discussion.) Arif’s second
path is understanding the importance of navigating accepted
social categories critically: it may well be that relations of
power have created specific social categories as a means
of legitimizing who gets to be in the center and who gets
marginalized. As we know, such categories may well be
socially constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less
socially real. Grappling with how to take their social reality
into account without reproducing the ideologies that natu-
ralize and reify them is yet another space we can enter in
order to build a new mode of anthropological knowledge
production.
Arif’s point leads to the second question that this set
of articles raised for me. Who actually are the interlocu-
tors here? Who are the actors with skin in the game? Arif
asks why we blindly reproduce the same divisions as Cold
War area studies (in which, I note, somehow the United
States always gets to be an area all on its own). Mathews
alludes to university job markets; Souza Lima discusses the
evaluation mechanisms behind contemporary audit culture
internationalization and demonstrates out that current forms
of institutionalized world anthropologies still use national or
areal associations. He also shows how Brazil, as a state, shapes
the construction of “Brazilian anthropology”—an anthropol-
ogy that turns to the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world
as a way to decenter the field, thereby reinscribing itself in
even older imperial formations. Clearly, older imperial and
newer nation-state formations are materially important: our
associations run along those lines, as do our funding agencies
(yes, even the European Union) and our education markets.
But perhaps it is time to consider what is gained and what
is lost in reproducing them, as well as what might need to
happen so that alternative modes of materially constructing
the market can get some purchase.
Here I wish to point to two gaps. The first is that all these
articles, it seems to me, are really talking about one subfield
of anthropology: the sociocultural one. This is perhaps not
surprising insofar as outside of the United States and Canada,
that is pretty much what anthropology is. Of course, far be
it from me to suggest things should be otherwise. Indeed, as
a linguistic anthropologist, it actually does me a lot of good
to have to engage with sciences du langage in France and the
world it influences; with various philologies in other parts
of Europe; or with applied linguistics in Britain and much
of Asia and Latin America (to suddenly get all area studies
on you). At the same time, it also does me a lot of good to
engage with archaeology, biological anthropology, and even
sociocultural anthropology. In particular, for the purposes
of our discussion here, some of these are fields with a long
tradition of transnational teamwork, with a great deal to say
about what it takes to make such teams work and what kinds
of knowledge gets produced as a result. Parenthetically, it
could also be enlightening to take a look from this perspective
at transnational anthropological efforts that are currently in
place, such as the rather large teams the European Union
tends to favor.
Mathews points to the second gap I want to highlight:
the absence of real engagement with what it means to have
to speak (or write) to each other across the divides of the dis-
cursive spaces into which we are socialized—some of which
get to impose their rules on others. This is, of course, an
old, old, debate in science, politics, commerce, and cul-
ture. We have used, for example, Latin and Sanskrit as
scientific linguae francae. “Vernacular” (read nation-state)
“languages” (that is, the named and codified forms produced
by national elites) challenged them. At the end of the 19th
century in Europe, Germany, France, and England competed
for top spot, while many intellectuals spent time inventing
International Auxiliary Languages (like Esperanto) to get
around that problem (depending how you count, about 500
such languages are thought to have been proposed in Europe
between 1870 and 1915). Computer languages are another
such solution.
English has been characterized as the contemporary lin-
gua franca of scientific knowledge production, with all the
attendant debates one might expect about just how equitable
access to it really is. Much of that debate centers around the
power of the native speaker to act, as Mathews says, as a
gatekeeper to the sacred realm of publication and conference
presentation. But we do not need to accept the terms of the
debate. We concocted the notion of national languages, of
mother tongues, and of native speakers—and we can un-
concoct them. They belong to the category of things that we
have invented in order to legitimize inequality and to mask
the real reasons why some people (so-called native speakers)
get to judge the communicative performance of others. Let
us not fall into the trap of reproducing naturalized ideologies
of language. Let’s cut to the chase of what kinds of values
we are actually debating and what kinds of tools we need
in order to do so without the smokescreen of language as a
naturalized object getting in our way.
Put differently, let’s not confuse language with discur-
sive space. If I offer that concept as a way to think through the
pitfalls and affordances of the idea of world anthropology–
anthropologies, it is because I think it allows us to both imag-
ine what conversations we want to be having with whom and
how the space itself is traversed with relations of power that
we need to take into account. We can look at the conditions
of its existence, the resources that circulate there and across
its boundaries, we can look at how the boundary works and
who gets to decide. This is in many ways simply another step
in the reflexive turn.

Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique
of the Mediation Processes
Comment
Global Anthropology versus Anthropologies
Junji Koizumi
Secretary-General at the International Union of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), and Osaka University, Japan
The question of anthropology versus anthropologies is essential.
Yasmeen Arif puts it in the context of Jacques Derrida’s
distinction of evidence and testimony. This is enlightening,
and the notion that “the process of evidence is absolutely
heterogeneous to that of testimony” is intriguing. Still, we
can also argue that, even if “the power to dictate what
Anthropology (with a capital ‘A’) is” is decided by a position
of centrality, it also comes from the testimony of those
who believe in a unified anthropology. Similarly, though
pluralistic “anthropologies” may derive from the testimony
of those in a marginal, subaltern, and native position (among
others), the notion of “anthropologies” may also be based
on the evidence as to the plurality of anthropologies whose
existence is undeniable. Anthropologies are anthropologies
whether or not there is someone who “swears to tell the
truth.”
Another way to address this issue of anthropology versus
anthropologies may be to place it in the context of the ques-
tion of anthropological universalism and particularism, even
if it may look less interesting and perhaps almost banal. On
the one hand, the orientation toward a singular anthropology
comes in part from a universalistic sense that without an
integrated notion of anthropology we may eventually lose
the base on which world anthropologies get together. The
orientation toward anthropologies, on the other hand, derives
from a particularistic sense that we inevitably underline a
hegemonic anthropology at the center of knowledge pro-
duction if we share a singularized notion of anthropology.
The question of anthropology versus anthropologies seems to
represent this tension between a universalist orientation for
having a single voice in anthropology, often anti-relativistic
and implicitly hegemonic, and a particularist orientation for
seeking a more horizontal formation of world anthropolo-
gies, often explicitly counterhegemonic.
This opposition of universalism and particularism is
related in a complex way to the issue of center and pe-
riphery, which often comes up in the argument over world
anthropologies. The notion of center and periphery tends to
be put in a dichotomous frame in regards to the world system
of knowledge production—the “Western” anthropology
at the center and anthropologies of the Global South and
other regions at the periphery. Even if the current situation
is close to this center–periphery (or center–peripheries)
World Anthropology 857
model, the center is not necessarily single either—and,
more importantly, centers and peripheries always exist in
relation to each other. Many peripheries are also centers
in relation to peripheries surrounding them, although the
existence of a center of centers and the reach of its global
power are critical issues we need to focus upon and clarify.
This succession of center–periphery chains does not uni-
laterally proceed from the center of centers in the Global
North toward the peripheries. This is clearly shown by
Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima’s discussion of “Brazil’s in-
ternal hegemonic centers of learning” (Rio de Janeiro, São
Paulo, and Brası́lia). According to him, scholars in these
centers are wholly trained in Brazil while those in nonhege-
monic positions are generally trained outside the country.
Examples of these reverse relations of center and periphery
in local and global terms may be found elsewhere, even if the
opposite is the case in many countries in East Asia (except
Japan), where doctoral degrees from one of the preeminent
universities in the “West” play a major role in positioning a
scholar in internal academic systems.
This suggests that the world of anthropological knowl-
edge may not be organized in a bipolar dichotomy with
“center” and “periphery” at its two extremes. Gordon
Mathews argues that the “West’s relative economic decline”
will lead “gradually and indirectly but inescapably to the
relative decline of Western and US anthropology as well”
and that other anthropologies “will increasingly contest US
anthropological world hegemony.” I am not sure if this eco-
nomic determinism holds because, while the economy may
provide one of the necessary conditions for academic devel-
opment, it is not the only determinant. Mathews goes on
to point out that we will increasingly live in a multipolar
world of anthropological power and influence with a range
of competing anthropological centers. This is probably true,
and we need to act to make this happen, but just as impor-
tant is to think about the nature of such competition and
concomitant cooperation among diverse anthropologies in
such a multipolar world.
At the present stage, a diversity of anthropologies is
only beginning to come into sight, as the global journal Déjà
Lu of the WCAA, now in its fourth issue, best illustrates.
The journal, even if it is edited and published by only a
handful of colleagues, including Gordon Mathews and Gus-
tavo Lins Ribeiro, is a potent tool for expanding the scope
of anthropology and bringing ideas, concerns, data, and
scholars together in a way that previously would not have
been possible due to lack of communication. New lines of
858 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
communication and a stable basis for strengthening anthro-
pological diversity were established by the founding of the
WCAA in Recife in 2004. At the same time, the revitaliza-
tion of the IUAES that Narotzky mentions started with the
17th World Congress of the IUAES in Manchester in 2013,
and it has been accelerated by subsequent Inter-Congresses
in Chiba, Japan, in 2014; Bangkok, Thailand, in 2015; and
Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2016. The revitalization will surely
continue and become more conspicuous through the Inter-
Congress in Ottawa, Canada, in 2017, and the 18th World
Congress in Florianópolis, Brazil, in 2018.
Along with these regular events, the IUAES and WCAA,
two complementary organizations growing ever closer to
each other, agreed to conduct a simultaneous vote among
their respective memberships on proposals to consolidate
their mutual relationship. Ballots were cast this summer,
and both memberships approved a proposal for an integrated
bicameral organization with IUAES and WCAA chambers.
With these vote results, serious talks and intense joint ac-
tivities will inspire further collaboration, leading to a more
effective, rational, and powerful formation for the world
anthropologies movement. So far, the IUAES and WCAA
have worked together to organize global conference panels
on topics of global interest and to collect and disseminate
news significant to global anthropology, as well as to support
endangered anthropological programs and beleaguered in-
stitutions, oppose budgetary cuts, protest undue arrest and
imprisonment, protect indigenous rights, and so forth. Déjà
Lu delivers anthropological articles throughout the world,
and a new WCAA project called the Global Survey of An-
thropological Practice (GSAP) is gathering rich information
on histories, institutions, problems, and practices of an-
thropologies in individual countries, exposing the reality of
anthropologies in specific settings and positions.
The world anthropologies movement can count these
among its achievements of import. Still, the real debate
for world anthropologies has hardly begun. Clifford Geertz
(1983:16) once wrote in a famous elegant phrase that “to see
ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening,” and world
anthropologies seem to be largely at this “eye-opening”
stage. Geertz went on to describe “the far more difficult
achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a
local example of the forms human life has locally taken,
a case among cases, a world among worlds.” If we could
begin to see anthropology as “an anthropology among
anthropologies,” we could escape the dichotomy of a single
global anthropology versus multiple global anthropologies
and instead build momentum for global anthropology as
opposed to global anthropologies. This global anthropology
would represent something constantly new, born only from
multiple anthropologies with an orientation toward a world
anthropology—“a global body of knowledge that will engage
multisited and historically embedded theories in an ongoing
conversation that will need to negotiate the power effects of a
multipolar world,” in Susana Narotzky’s words (this issue). If
we enter into this process, we necessarily enter into debates
and negotiations. We may encounter contradictions, irrec-
oncilable differences, and even conflicts, not only among
anthropologies but also among anthropologists, but such a
process may provide a way out of the static “cartographic
imaginations that the area studies paradigm spawned,” as Arif
puts it.
A relativist stance toward multiple global anthropolo-
gies with a simple attitude of tolerance or curiosity for
different anthropologies will not do. Anti-relativism for a
single global anthropology that actually tries to impose a
supposedly shared universal value can be more problematic
than present hegemonic anthropology. What we have yet
to obtain is an “anti anti-relativistic” (Geertz 2000) world
anthropology, which would simultaneously embrace diversi-
fying anthropological ideas and practices along with a marked
propensity for a global anthropology that will always be in
the making.
REFERENCES CITED
Geertz, Clifford
1983 Introduction. In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in In-
terpretive Anthropology. Clifford Geertz, auth. Pp. 3–16.
New York: Basic.
2000 Anti Anti-Relativism. In Available Light: Anthropological
Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Clifford Geertz, auth.
Pp. 42–67. Princeton: Princeton University Press.