Participate! Cultural Anthropological Perspectives on a Contemporary Imperative.

Abstract

The call to participate and the demand to be involved have become ubiquitous in many areas of society and an imperative of the contemporary. People demand that their point of view and their expertise be taken into account in decision-making processes or are called upon to contribute to design and implement certain projects. What it means in practice to participate can take different forms and produce different experiences. The four articles in this volume, which were written as part of a teaching research project at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, present different participation projects and their contexts. They take us to to the schoolyard, to a clinical research project, to the museum, and a feminist collective in Uruguay. Drawing closely on the experiences of those who participate, they work out what makes participation possible, but also sets limits, and how the actors deal with the tensions that arise. The introduction to the volume introduces cultural anthropological approaches to researching and analyzing participation and presents the four contributions to the volume.