João Pina-Cabral is Senior Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of Universidade de Lisboa and Emeritus Professor in the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environment at the University of Kent (UK). He was co-founder and president of the Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia and of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in Portugal, Macau, Mozambique and Bahia. Principal works: Filhos de Adão, Filhas de Eva (trad. port., D. Quixote 1989), Os contextos da antropologia (Difel 1991), Aromas de Urze de Lama (2ª ed, ICS 2008), Em Terra de Tufões (Instituto Cultural de Macau 1993), O homem na família (ICS 2003), Between China and Europe (Berg 2002), Gente Livre (Terceiro Nome, S. Paulo 2013). His most recent workWorld: An anthropological examination—Chicago, HAU books, 2017) reflects on the conditions of possibility of the ethnographic gesture and was awarded the Malinowski Prize. He edited with R. Feijó and H. Martins A morte no Portugal contemporâneo (Querco 1984), with J.K. Campbell Europe Observed (Macmilan 1992), with A.P.Lima Elites (Berg 2000), with Fernando Gil O processo da crença (Gradiva 2004), with Clara Carvalho A persistência da história (ICS 2004), with S. M. Viegas Nomes (Almedina 2007), with F. Pine On the margins of religion (Berghahn 2008), with C. Toren The challenge of epistemology (2011), and with G. Bowman After Society (Berghahn 2020).

Research interests:
Person, kinship and family; religion, symbolism and power; ethnicity and the postcolonial condition; ethnographic theory.

Academia.edu: https://kent.academia.edu/JoaoPinaCabral
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joao_Pina-Cabral/research
University of Kent:
https://tinyurl.com/2p85mrwu
ORCID:
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7180-4407?lang=en
Email preferencial:
pina.cabral@ics.ul.pt

Possible Anthropology

João Pina-Cabral
Instituto de Ciências Sociais
Universidade de Lisboa

Conferência inaugural APA-Évora Setembro 2022

What anthropology might we want to practice? This lecture attempts to account for the conditions of possibility of anthropology as a scientific discipline in the present conjuncture in Portugal, Europe and the world. Confronted with the knowledge that the worst excesses of history are to be repeated and, thus, alerted to the dull rumblings of a possible civilizational apocalypse, anthropologists are moved to recognize the inevitability of their ethnocentrism—that is, the fact that they are an integral part of history on the move. At the same time, when engaging in comparativism, we are led to exercise more and more critically our vocation of de-ethnocentrification. This results from the growing possibility of encompassing the thinking concerning the human condition of the best thinkers of all analytical traditions from all over the world and all times. To this end, the paper argues that there is only one possible way out in order to understand properly the process of diversification that is the constitutive condition of all sociality and all life: the practice of an analytical vision that subordinates essence to existence; that subordinates semiotics to practice; that embraces our human condition in the study of the human condition. In sum, the anthropology that is possible will inevitably be non-Western from an epistemological point of view, and non-Orientalistfrom a methodological point of view. This implies the adoption of more intensive modes of ethnographic practice; modes that embrace head-on its condition as a scientific empirical discipline. In the decade to come, the survival of anthropology as a discipline must remain be deaf to Siren’s song of virtualism and mediatisation, which the universalisation of online communication has made so desirable.

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