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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

SELECTED PANEL

( pn79 )

Local Practices and Emerging Traditions of Anthropological Knowledge Making in Post Covid

organizers

    Mohammad Pedda Hothur

    Nationality: India

    Residence: India

    Department of Sociology, Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU)

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

    Bridja Cherifa

    Nationality: Algeria

    Residence: Algeria

    Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Oran 2, Algeria

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

chairs

    IUAES Affiliation: Anthropology and Education

    Keywords:

    Local Practices, Emerging Traditions, Anthropological knowledge, Post Covid

    Abstract:

    Fredrik Barth (2002), based on the ethnographic materials he collected, had highlighted three faces of knowledge - a substantive corpus of assertions, a range of media of representation, and a social organization – pointing out interrelating of them in personal ways, in different traditions of knowledge, generating a criteria, validating knowledge about the world. The trajectory of a tradition of knowledge is to a large extent endogenously determined, implying that how the already established thoughts, representations, and social relations in a system, configure and filter our individual human experience of the world around us, to a considerable extent, and thereby generate culturally diverse worldviews. Since the stock of knowledge varies greatly between different individuals thus showing staggering ethnographic diversity in different social systems, comparative ethnographic analysis is considered to be central to the agenda of anthropological knowledge making in different societies/cultures. Anthropology which studied the unusual, dramatic, and puzzling aspects of human life discovering the parallels in human customs, has traversed through different phases until its present form, exploring several dimensions of knowledge making. The attempts of the anthropologists collecting data through travelogues, voyages, explorations, etc., studying human variability, though dubbed to hardly be scientific because of lack of training to record and interpret the same among the observers as well as authors representing this ilk, added greatly to anthropological knowledge making understanding queer customs and manners among exotic societies. In the process, it is stated that, “The first systematic anthropologists were gifted ameteurs – physicians, natural historians, lawyers, businessmen - to whom anthropology was a hobby. They applied common sense, the habits they had learned in their professions, and the fashionable scientific doctrines of their day to growing knowledge about “primitive” peoples”. The discipline has attained the nomenclature of ‘the science of leftovers, with the contributions made by Frazer’s Golden Bough, Taylor, Morgan, etc., during the nineteenth century with a tradition of relative objectivity achieved through its practices. Anthropological knowledge making process continued and prospered adopting vigorous protocols of data collection suitable to time and space even when human life altered drastically with the bewildering rapidity adopted in the wake of modernity, industrialization, digitization, etc.. However, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic fostered an unforeseen atmosphere posing challenges and, of course, throwing new opportunities as well. It offered various alternative forms of methods and methodologies in knowledge making. The digital societies and cultures have rooted strongly into the social systems after Covid-19 emerging as alternative methods in the process of human knowledge and development. The on-line learning methods have started operating in making the life, giving scope for rising several other such local and global practices. In the wake of this, our panel seeks to explore the varied practices of anthropological knowledge making emerged post-covid 19. Prospective participants in this panel may send the abstracts encompassing the practices and experiences, case material documented invoking from their respective local traditions, community initiatives, etc., or otherwise, addressing anthropological knowledge making.