Crumbling Certainties

Doing Anthropology in a Crisis-Ridden Contemporary – and Future

Abstract

This article examines how anthropological research and practice can be shaped in a present marked by social, political, and economic crises – conceptually, methodologically, and professionally. Drawing on the anthropologies of the contemporary and the future, I show how processes of crumbling certainties can be understood as situated experiences of social transformation, and how affect-theoretical perspectives trace their embodied entanglements with historical and socio-material contexts. I discuss how collaborative and publicly engaged research may generate socially relevant, multiperspectival, and sustainable knowledge under conditions of political volatility, and argue that research collaborations must be (made) resilient under constraints on academic autonomy, repressive regimes, and transnational power asymmetries in both the ‘Global South’ and ‘Global North.’ These reflections draw on ethnographic studies, partly collaborative, on moral subject formation in Tanzania, experiences of flight and arrival in Germany, and the affective embodiment of the pandemic as well as decolonial engagements with ethnographic collections.