Anthropology and 1968: Openings and closures |
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| Authors: | Knut M Rio Bjørn Enge Bertelsen |
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| Institution: | 1. Professor at the University Museum of Bergen, Norway. His recent research concerns issues of wealth, cultural heritage and the commons.;2. Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. His research includes political anthropology, egalitarianism and urban Africa and his published works include the monograph Violent becomings: State formation, sociality, and power in Mozambique (2016). |
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| Abstract: | It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter‐insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were formative for anthropology and neighbouring disciplines. We believe that anthropology experienced a liminal period, with Carlos Castaneda and Victor Turner as leading figures, and that the closures and denials of that sense of anti‐structure have marked the discipline after 1968. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari and their account of May 1968 as an event of ‘suffocation’ and a ‘return to the intolerable’. |
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