Forum Rethinking Euro-Anthropology

A remarkable fact of recent developments in Science and Technology Studies is that anthropologists have begun to study the laboratories of natural scientists but have not turned the anthropological gaze onto themselves. Until ethnographic studies of the functioning of anthropology departments in France, Germany, Finland, Japan and other countries are done, symmetrical anthropology, as Latour (2013: 290) calls it, remains unrealised. If the gossip and rumours that circulate in the corridors are any guide, then one suspects that the results of a truly symmetrical anthropology would not be a pretty sight to behold. Academic institutional politics, shaped as it is by squabbles over the distribution of research funding and big-man struggles for prestige and status, is but a minor variation on the wheeling and dealing that generations of political anthropologists have described in their ethnographies from various parts of the world. A comparative ethnography of anthropology departments would reveal that there are winners and losers, high points and low. It would also reveal the existence of a wide range of national traditions, each with its own theoretical language, academic politics and institutional sources of funding.