A Political Anthropologist's Journey from the Local to the Global: An Interview with Irène Bellier (CNRS-EHESS) (original) (raw)

2015, American Anthropologist

At two recent international conferences (The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences [IUAES] 2013 and 2014), two themes caught my attention. One was that of "crisis." Partly animating this crisis were budget cuts to the institutions that fund research, which, as various colleagues argued, appeared to be the same all over the world. Young anthropologists, I heard, were having difficulties entering institutions permanently. Trained researchers were all the time counting on more obligations and lower budgets. The positions that remained vacant were not filled. But the Argentinean case, without a doubt, demonstrates a different reality, which I will discuss here. The other theme that caught my attention, which is related to the previous, regards a debate that emerged in the panel "Brazilian Anthropology: Present and Future" at the 2014 IUAES coordinated by Carmen Rial and sponsored by the ABA (Associação Brasileira de Antropologia). At this debate, colleagues talked not only about certain issues and current directions in Brazilian anthropology but also discussed the situation (inclusion) of anthropologists in Brazil. This question was particularly relevant to an anthropology that finds its place in public debates and in which anthropologists have had the capacity to occupy important positions working for the state or in nonacademic areas (see Velho 2003). This frame spurred comparisons between the ways anthropologists insert themselves into the labor force and relate themselves to the academy, have the ability to manage knowledge, or become part of that iron machine of the state. The debates that emerged in those days and continued later made me reflect on the centrality of institutions in knowledge production and, more specifically, the place of anthropologists as public employees. These issues (crisis, inclusion, knowledge production), taken together, account for a restructuring of labor relations from which we as workers are not exempt. The different realities of researchers, researchers-professors, professorsresearchers, and professors in the world are central to understanding how knowledge is produced. Thinking about the ways in which we work and reflecting on our relationship with institutions permits us to understand forms of knowledge production beyond those already-analyzed hegemonic