Anthropology and Responsibility

Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, Christos Lynteris, Melissa Demian, Mattia Fumanti, Christos Lynteris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000859607
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the role and implications of responsibility for anthropology, asking how responsibility is recognised and invoked in the world, what relations it draws upon, and how it comes to define notions of the person, institutional practices, ways of knowing and modes of evaluation. The category of responsibility has a long genealogy within the discipline of anthropology and it surfaces in contemporary debates as well as in anthropologists' collaboration with other disciplines, including when anthropology is applied in fields such as development, medicine, and humanitarian response. As a category that unsettles, challenges and critically engages with political, ethical and epistemological questions, responsibility is central to anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, collaborative research, and applied engagement. With chapters focused on a variety of cultural contexts, this volume considers how anthropology can contribute to a better understanding of responsibility, including the 'responsibility of anthropology' and the responsibility of anthropologists to specific others.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: Anthropology and Responsibility
• 1 Edgy imaginaries: “Ghost” orangutans, extinction, and responsibility in a plantation landscape
• 2 The responsibility to consume: Excessive “environmentourism” against rhinoceros extinction in South Africa
• 3 Responsibility versus responsibilization: Mafiacraft, witchcraft and the rise of conspiracy thinking today1
• 4 In the wake of disenchantment: Silence and the limits of ethnographic attentiveness
• 5 The Vulnerability Vortex: Health, exclusion, and social responsibility
• 6 Keeping things under control: Responsibilities toward things, homes, and people in hoarding disorder
• 7 Racialized positionalities: Ethnographic responsibility and the anthropology of racism and white supremacy
• 8 Of Calcutta, death, and the South: Juxtaposing three Calcuttas/Kolkatas
• 9 The countess’ diaries and taonga Māori: Twenty-first century collaborations around nineteenth century collecting
• 10 Responsibility and complicity in the UK “hostile environment”
• Index