Las antropologías hegemónicas y las antropologías del sur: el caso de España

El tema “Las antropologías hegemónicas y las antropologías del Sur” es una cuestión no sólo epistemológica sino de poder y de definición de los espacios posibles de producción de conocimiento antropológico. Es también un tema que entronca con cuestiones de ética y de responsabilidad y con la forma como se define la relación de la investigación antropológica con los sujetos antropológicos. Se ha debatido mucho sobre este tema, sobre todo a partir de los años 1960s, coincidiendo con los procesos de descolonización, de surgimiento de nuevos estados-nación, de nuevos discursos nacionalistas post-coloniales, de nuevos procesos de dominación, de movimientos de protesta política, civil y social en diversos lugares del mundo. Aquí voy a intentar trazar los grandes rasgos de este debate, señalando de qué manera las luchas vindicativas en determinadas coyunturas históricas han modificado el ámbito epistemológico de la antropología y transformado la relación de fuerzas entre las antropologías; pero también quiero mostrar como persisten las formas de dominación y de hegemonía de las antropologías del norte, y cómo, en el momento presente en España esta hegemonía está ligada estrechamente a la implantación del llamado proceso de Bolonia o Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior.The theme “Hegemonic anthropologies and the anthropologies of the South” is both an epistemological question and an issue of power and of the definition of the possible spaces for the production of anthropological knowledge. It is also an issue that relates to the ethics and responsibilities of anthropological research towards anthropological subjects. Starting in the 1960s and following decolonization, the emergence of new nation-states, new post-colonial nationalist discourses, new processes of domination, of social movements of politic and civic protest around the world, these issues have been widely debated. In the present contribution I want to trace the main lines of the debate, underscoring how claims and struggles in particular historical conjunctures have modified the epistemological context of anthropology and transformed the lines of power between anthropologies. I will also show the persistence of the forms of domination and hegemony of the anthropologies of the North, and how, in the present moment, in Spain, this hegemony is strongly related to the setting of the European Space for Higher Education, called the Bologna process

Teaching in crisis: Anthropology under structural adjustment

In this paper I want to address the pressure of structural adjustment policies on teaching and learning anthropology. I will base my thoughts on the Spanish case but the reflexion is applicable to many other countries in Europe. The decline in public funding and the increase in fees have transformed the meaning of higher education. Increasingly, productivity criteria and ranking measures become the guides to university investments and social valorisation of competing disciplines in the public eye.In this paper I want to address the pressure of structural adjustment policies on teaching and learning anthropology. I will base my thoughts on the Spanish case but the reflexion is applicable to many other countries in Europe. The decline in public funding and the increase in fees have transformed the meaning of higher education. Increasingly, productivity criteria and ranking measures become the guides to university investments and social valorisation of competing disciplines in the public eye

La política de la evidencia en un mundo incierto: Experiencia, conocimiento, datos sociales y verdad factual

Knowledge is never self-evident and is always a struggle about evidence: what counts and what does not count. Knowledge is part of the politics of evidence. We need to unravel the processes that create truth values in a field of power. Here I wish to address the tension between experience, vernacular knowledge, and evidence as they constitute the foundations of political mobilization during the economic recession in Spain. How is experience valued, and what kind of knowledge about society does it produce? How might we engage with this knowledge as anthropologists trying to understand what social facts are, and the value they have as evidence in political argument and struggle?  El conocimiento nunca es evidente por sí mismo y es siempre una lucha por la evidencia: lo que cuenta y lo que no cuenta. El conocimiento es parte de la política de la evidencia. Necesitamos desentrañar los procesos que crean valores de verdad en un campo de poder. Aquí deseo abordar la tensión entre la experiencia, el conocimiento vernáculo y la evidencia, ya que constituyen los cimientos de la movilización política durante la recesión económica en España. ¿Cómo se valora la experiencia y qué tipo de conocimiento sobre la sociedad produce? ¿Cómo podemos involucrarnos con este conocimiento como antropólogos/as que intentan comprender qué son los hechos sociales y el valor que tienen como evidencia en la discusión y la lucha políticas

Spain is the Problem, Europe the Solution’: Economic Models, Labour Organization and the Hope for a Better Future

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (2004 [1916]) coined a sentence that was to become a leitmotiv in the process of Spain’s integration into the European Community: ‘Spain is the problem, Europe the solution. ’ In 2006, for example, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Spain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) , the sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, then Director of the Think Tank Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos, after referring to Ortega’s original statement, added: The desire to Europeanize Spain, that is, to modernize it and move with the times, was not so much one of several elements in the political project of contemporary Spain, but its central core, the best summary, a project that brought together equally the left and the right, center and periphery, rich and poor. To Europeanize was to modernize and to modernize was to change. … Our Europeanism was incoming..

On waging the Ideological war: Against the hegemony of form

This article seeks to rehabilitate the concept of ideology as a necessary tool of struggle against present-day capitalism. Post-structuralist epistemologies, by celebrating pluralism and the emergent character of knowledge and politics, have rendered the intellectual production of a unitary theory an obsolete remnant of a Modernist past. I contend that these well-meaning anti-authoritarian epistemologies unwillingly express the hegemony of a form that the Austrian school proposed for market competition in the first half of the 20th century. Based on ethnographic material of Spain, I acknowledge the need to develop a new conceptual framework that captures the singular experienced realities of the present but links them in a coherent unitary theoretical structure. The productive power of the 'hegemony of form' requires the construction of an ideology that may not only destroy it but also provide the basis of a counter-hegemony for producing a better future

The Payoff of Love and the Traffic of Favours: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Blurring of Value Realms in Flexible Capitalism

This chapter is based on two ethnographic experiences in Spain, the first in a farming area of rural Catalonia (where I undertook research from 1986 to 1988), the second one in a regional economy in the south of the autonomous community of Valencia (where I carried out research in 1995/6 with Gavin Smith). A historical perspective, central to both analyses, has enabled a better understanding of historical transformation, particularly in relation to changes in production relations and to related emergent conflicts. By comparing these two instances, I wish to underscore the productive tension between two apparently distinct domains of social and moral obligation: that of personal and intimate relations (in the home, among friends and kin), and that of production relations (clearly linked to a market logic). Although in both cases a similar entanglement of values pertaining to different realms occurs, the degree and manner in which this situation seems to become structural to capital accumulation differs. I will propose that we need different categories from those that have characterized the social sciences since the rise of modernity. Instead of discrete, differentiated abstractions often opposed in pairs, we need methodological instruments that allow for pervasive ambiguity in order to understand present-day processes of value production, circulation and accumulation. Instead of an evolutionary understanding of temporality, we need historical complexity devoid of any form of teleology