Best of Times, Worst of Times – Social Anthropology 1975-2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46585/cargo.2026.1.188Keywords:
autoethnography, ageing in and of anthropology, higher educationAbstract
In this article the author traces the parallel themes of ‘ageing in anthropology’ and the ‘ageing of anthropology’ by reflecting on the experience of being an academic exposed to and working in the academic and institutional contexts of predominantly British social anthropology from the mid-1970s to the present. The author adopts an autoethnographic approach, describing and reflecting on what he discerns as some of the key changes in the discipline over this fifty-year period, as well as some of his responses to them. What have been the enablers and levers – ideological, technological, geopolitical, economic – through which anthropology as a discipline, and his practice of it, has changed? Given the ‘decades of crises’ (Ringel 2021), the effects of the Anthropocene (including the impact of Covid-19 and other emergent pandemics), the increase in global inequalities, the growth of authoritarianism and the hegemony of corporate capitalism, should one dare to hope for the future of anthropology? What hopes can there be for the future of the discipline both within academia and beyond?
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