My contribution addresses the challenges that anthropology faces under two angles. First, I will chart the increasing precarization of anthropologists and discuss the positions that they inhabit as precarious knowledge workers. Partly as a result of PrecAnthro’s anti-precarity organizing within EASA since at least 2016, partly because of the overrepresentation of precarious anthropologists within the association, EASA has undergone a significant shift over the last few years. The association, whose last two presidents and last vice-president started their mandate as precariously employed academics, embarked on a trajectory against precarity in academia that is political and engaged. To this first discussion, I add the second angle: that of broader political engagement against imperial violence. EASA was the first anthropological association to condemn the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians and to warn against what was already legible in October 2023 as attempts to limit academic freedom and censor pro-Palestinian voices. Its statement was issued on the 25th of October 2023. It was contested by a minority of the EASA membership, and debates are planned on the question of the legitimacy of EASA issuing political statements at the upcoming conference. How are these two discussions connected? I take as an axiom the fact that global struggles – against precarity, against imperial violence, against climate injustice – are interconnected. I ask what it means for anthropology to exist, operate, and take stances in a time of crumbling empires. I ask whether anthropology is prepared to speak truth to power, or whether our associations are merely willing to speak to power in order to accommodate imperial hegemonies, and thus to continue to inhabit the ambivalent position of a discipline that arose in the context of colonialism, is deeply inscribed in its structures, yet purports to decolonize knowledge and the practices by which we produce it.