The New Anthropology: World Anthropologies

- The 'world anthropologies' project wants to contribute to the articulation of a diversified anthropology that is more aware of the social, epistemological, and political conditions of its own production.

- The network has three main goals:

1. to examine critically the international dissemination of anthropology (whose work is funded and published and who's not) and the processes through which this dissemination takes place (who controls the publishing industry and which form of ethnography is recognized);
2. to contribute to the development of a plural landscape of anthropologies that is both less shaped by metropolitan hegemonies (academic English for example) and more open to the potential of globalization for a multiplicity of languages (the language of the observed for example- dialects) and their hybridization (i.e. The juxtaposition of the two different speeches—the anthropologist's and the native's);
3. to foster conversations among anthropologists from various regions of the world in order to assess the diversity of relations between regional or national anthropologies and a contested, power-laden, disciplinary discourse (being constantly aware and self-reflexive).

The Ethical Question:

1. Participant observation transforms the anthropologists from a detached observer into actors within a social reality.
2. In this context, can/should anthropologists be neutral, disengaged spectators?

Moral engagement in anthropology:

Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues for a radical approach which is politically committed and morally engaged. She believes that anthropology must be ethically grounded and that cultural relativism, which she equates with moral relativism (the logical conclusion of the postmodern critique), is no longer appropriate. She is critical of the anthropologist as a 'neutral, dispassionate, cool and rational objective observer of the human condition' (Scheper-Hughes, 1995:410).

From Detachment to Engagement:

The Challenge of the New Millennium