Thanks for the paper. I have to think it through, but certainly struggle for different coursework and inclusion of local perspectives is a worthy goal.

Sorry for small white-hijacking of discussion, but @Aurelija Drevel is using false claims to counter your argument.

“Do they know about trumpism? Of course, it is pretty hard not to, but it does not seem to be appealing to the white men there. ”

Except for Orban in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, Fico in Slovakia, rise of AfD in Germany and Geert Wilders in Netherlands. All of them came to power around Trump (Wilders and Kaczyński were before, but they got new push around Trump). All of them adopted anti-imigrant, nationalistic, anti-civic rights rhetoric.

<Poland is a great case, because it provided facilities for CIA black-sites for torturing prisoners, so I’d love to hear more about lack of American appeal to our governments>

Exhibit A:
http://niezalezna.pl/imgcache/750×430/c/uploads/news/dtpad.png
President of Poland during Trump visit. Nationalistic fest for right-wing in Poland. January 2018. Photo from right-wing nut-press.

” Yes ofc, but it largely is connected to the alcohol abuse problem, also the certain cultural aspects coming from the communist past (aka no human rights movement almost at all). ”

Except for abortion ban in Poland, anti-feminism in Hungary and in Slovakia.

Before you speak something about human right movement in EE, please learn about Orange Alternative, First Solidarity. Havel or Walesa, regardless of their individual differences, relied exactly on ideals of human rights movement. E.g. if you take Moc bezmocných only as anti-communist, you are reading it in a very shallow way.

“Do we have metoo there? No, it never gained popularity there, neither white men, nor the white women in a control group were interested in it.”

For Poland: Well, before metoo, anchor of daily news (Durczok) went down for harassment in Poland. During metoo, editor of national desk (Wybieralski) in major newspaper (Wyborcza) was also accussed and removed from office. Currently at least one right-wing delegate has a court case for domestic violence. Major newspapers (Wyborcza) wrote about metoo several times.

Exhibit B:

Maja Staśko writing on metoo after one year
http://codziennikfeministyczny.pl/metoo-wygodniej-uwierzyc-sprawcy-ale-wlasnie-dlatego-trzeba-wierzyc-skrzywdzonym/

“So when, in anthropology, in all seriousness, we say that certain problems are the “white race” problems, we completely ignore the tendencies in roughly a half of the white population world wide. When you do not have the same behavior in a control group, it is normal to ask ok, to what our research group was exposed to, which could have made the difference from control?”

Even intro readings to minority / post-colo studies should guide you to matrix of domination / intersectionality issues. In USA race is entangled with toxic masculinity. In Poland, toxic masculinity is also connected with catholic church and antisemitism, but at the same time right wing propaganda is being translated 1:1. So we have racial hatred without significant racial minorities, while sharing similar exclusionary practices against people from Ukraine.

To sum up:
As a white male from Poland I do not know much about indigenous approaches and related issues (Polish anthropology was a part of Russian / Soviet colonial project, so it is the issue for another day, because Polish anthropologists in Siberia or Kazach tribes were both colonizers and colonized).

But as long as people like Aurelija still make claims about “Europe” without checking the facts, provincialization of Western European classics is a necessary condition. We may not have Inuits in Poland, but we still get a fair share of overconfident anthropologists.

And as you try to flatten out the differences between anti-racist work and white supremacy by claiming that they are formally similar and are nothing but two sides of the same coin, you are entirely ignoring the (present) history of anti-black racism in the US and elsewhere, a (present) history built not just on inequality in some abstract sense, but on the enslavement, rape, murder, dismemberment, and disenfranchisement of black people by white people in specific ways for specific ends. To point out the ways all that matters today, including in the ways that ordinary discourse and routinized practices of representation contribute to the ongoing forms of structural violence rooted in that specific history, is not ‘pure color coding’. It’s an acknowledgement of the specificity of this history and its legacies.

thank you, Katie!

I mean, imagine…. all the serious academia people needing to negotiate the mother language copyright issues… with a bunch of teenager kids from a subculture… it is satisfyingly entertaining at the very least. 🙂

Here is actually an interview with them, which explains why they use maori heritage, without any anthropological society permission I would suspect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMz2iRMQeBE&t=165s 🙂

http://www.asaanz.org/blog/2018/6/18/an-open-letter-to-the-hau-journals-board-of-trustees

In defence of theory though a number of the ideas you mentioned (especially the Pluriversity – thank you for introducing me to this) have very close parallels in European Anthropology/philosophy which you may have overlooked and dismissed under the rubric of “high theory”. Latour’s concept of “symmetrical anthropology” would seem to resonate quite well with Mbembe and as another commented pointed out above, that could be an opportunity for an “alliance” of sorts – one that does indeed provincialise European thought, whilst still including European thought in the process. Which leads on to a more general point of critique regarding a lot of de/post-colonial scholarship which is that it tends to try to completely unmake/deconstruct/dismiss/replace European thought, rather than simply undermining its claims to universality which would seem to me to be the root of its structural violence. I don’t think you went so far as to do that in this piece, but there was a hint of heading in that direction.

I know you used the hyperbolic passage above regarding Heidegger/Deleuze/ontology etc for rhetorical affect, but the political implications of what scholars like Viveiros De Castro have proposed as “ontological self-determination” seems to take the spirit of your argument here in a very serious, exciting and – I hope, but this is yet to be seen – liberating direction.

Again to echo the comments of another above, we should be open to the possibilities of radicalism that are already there and build the alliances that currently exist as possibilities – many of these lie in the exciting theoretical possibilities that Anthropology can offer as well. To grossly paraphrase Patrice Maniglier, in order to take other modes of thought seriously (much as you propose here, and Dr TallBear does as well) Anthropology must become a science of comparison and transformation which constantly engages the possibility of such radically different modes of thought in which “science” would no longer even be possible.

There is so much possibility in the shift you have outlined above, and it is exciting to think about the political and social force that a huge shift in Anthropological thinking may be a part of.