Field-defying Political Anthropologies

I. Definition What is political anthropology for you? How do you understand both anthropology and politics (or the political): what is politics (or the political) and what does anthropology mean to you? The relation between anthropology and the domain of the political is very important to me in the sense that it orients and organises my understanding of anthropological research. It informs my research and writing endeavours in several registers in fundamental ways. As I reflect on your opening questions, I find them to be charged with great interpellatory force. They come across as an invitation to put forward a manifesto, a field-defining programme. Here, I think I am better placed to try and articulate a field-defying proposition, rather than a field-defining one. I am therefore wondering how I can hold within the same frame the idea of a manifesto or a programme – for the discipline, for the political – whilst at the same time acknowledging the relation between dis-interpellatory practices and a desire for the political. I am inspired by José Esteban Muñoz’s (1999) reworking of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s insights into the counter- and cross-identificatory dynamics at play in social, political and sexual boundary-setting and associated “turf-war thinking” (Muñoz, 1999, p. 8). It may be a question of emphasis: a political anthropology can help convey the distinct accent or inflection of a desire for the political to ground anthropological endeavours, whilst simultaneously marki

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Manifesto · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

• The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality

  Open Access•Posocco, Cecilia Anne Mccallum et al.•Cambridge Handbook for the…•2023

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