William A. Douglass Distinguished International Lecture 2009
Friday evening, December 4, 6:15-7:30pm
Independence Ballroom I
Open cash bar and buffet 7:30-8:30pm
BEING AT HOME IN THE GLOBAL VILLAGE:
CHALLENGES FOR ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Renée Hirschon
The quality of 21st century life, its global networks, the intimacy and the distance of electronic communication, and the rapidly changing nature of social, economic, and political relationships have posed serious questions about the status and relevance of Anthropology, its conventional focus and methodology. Accelerated migration and mobility results in an expanded range of cross cultural contacts. The experience of displacement and loss of home affect millions of people and raises acute issues of identity and belonging. Human rights precepts held as universal principles, and the anthropological commitment to promoting contextual understanding (cultural relativism) create a problematic juxtaposition.
Anthropology has the unique potential to promote comprehension through its interpretive mode, but it has sometimes fallen subject to cultural and individual solipsism, to self-doubt, and to a nihilistic critique of previous work which mitigates against, rather than enhances, cross-cultural understanding. Anthropology has accrued a vast body of traditional wisdom which could well be quarried to construct a radical inclusive philosophy. Bearing in mind the dangers of essentialism, and having proven adept at dealing with constructions of the ‘Self ‘and the ‘Other’, Anthropology’s expertise could nonetheless rise to the contemporary challenge of transcending this divide. It could reflect and promote the growing realisation that we are equally endowed and responsible co-inhabitants of the planet. The importance of this role is obvious as the environmental crisis looms ever closer, and threats to survival itself become more apparent.
Renée Hirschon was educated at the universities of Cape Town, Chicago, and Oxford. She is currently Senior Research Fellow and College Lecturer in Social Anthropology at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and a member of the Academic Steering Committee of the European Studies Centre and of South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
Her major study was among Asia Minor refugees who were settled in Piraeus, Greece, following the 1923 Lausanne Convention which specified the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This resulted in the monograph Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe (2nd ed., 1998).
Her most recent publication, an edited volume Crossing the Aegean (2003, 2004), is a bilateral appraisal of the long-term effects of ‘ethnic cleansing’ on both countries.
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