European Social Anthropology in 2018: an Increasingly Recursive Public

Abstract

In 2018, social anthropology finds itself increasingly concerned with its technical, legal, and political conditions of possibility. The long-term effects of austerity, financialization, and the technological transformation of media on teaching, research, and publishing have led to intense struggles over the labor and property regimes underpinning the discipline. In responding to these challenges, anthropologists seem to be re-conceptualizing their own personhood and labor through the diverse conceptualizations of their interlocutors. However, it is also important to remember what makes social anthropology and its unique professional challenges but a small facet of a larger human condition. By way of conclusion, I offer kinship (the public’s constitutive other) as one potential means of grappling with the limitations of social anthropology’s own publicity.