thomkennonMar 25
Radical Anthropology

TONIGHT
FREE Fediscience, please boost!

✨Tues Mar 31, 18:30 (UTC London)🌔
Anne Monk and Jacob Seagrave
Young Engels and the politics of the encounter

All welcome
LIVE in Daryll Forde Room, 2nd Floor, UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, WC1H 0BW
ZOOM ID 952 8554 1412 passcode Wawilak

Mar 25 at 9:04amWeb
Show threadRadical AnthropologyMar 25
Anne Monk and Jacob Seagrave explore how the young Friedrich Engels' 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' provides a neglected model of ‘communist ethnography’, a politically committed form of longterm investigation that has critical implications for the practice of anthropology today.
Show threadRadical AnthropologyMar 25
By reading the text through the parallel histories of investigation as experimented with by both communist revolutionaries and professional anthropologists alike in the 20th century – detouring through examples like Mao’s Hunan Report and Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer – we...
Show threadRadical AnthropologyMar 25
we will delve into issues such as the politics of the encounter, the role of the intellectual and the meaning of difference. We will argue that a renewed dialogue between Marxism and anthropology can speak to problems of socialist politics today.
Show threadRadical AnthropologyMar 25
Jacob Seagrave is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics researching agricultural cooperatives in Andalucía, Spain. Anne Monk is a graduate medical student at the Warwick Medical School.
Show threadAlx 🐈5d ago
@RadicalAnthro I find “communist ethnography” an interesting term that I never encountered before. Leaving Comunism as a political theory aside, I find intriguing to insert the “common” in a practice that often creates a clear boundary between the ethnographer (the observer) and the research participants, for whom the benefits of the research are often quite obscured and not really very material. Not sure the talk necessarily goes in that direction, but hope I can attend online nonetheless
Show threadRadical Anthropology5d ago
@alx that's good! we're very interested in this. Did you ever read this work by Engels, it is astonishing social geography in 1840s Manchester?
Show threadAlx 🐈5d ago
@RadicalAnthro thank you! No, I haven’t read this work, and that’s really why I am so interested in this talk (and added the book in my reading list). I hope to be able to attend (online), and maybe (depending on the talk), I can ask about it. I think the idea of “common” and “communism” in ethnography is particularly intriguing: what are “the commons” in an ethnographic practice? What are & who owns the means of ethnographic production? (Still half-baked thoughts, I have no clear theory yet)
Show threadCouncilsInExile4d ago

@RadicalAnthro I couldn't make it in person so tried to join by zoom but it won't let me in on the web app.

A shame because I think this sort of investigation super needed right now, but maybe there will be future discussions on this topic ?

Show threadRadical Anthropology3d ago
@RevPancakes oh dear, I do not understand why, we try to make it accessible to all. We hope to have a recording, really nice talk,quite a bit of discussion.
Show threadCouncilsInExile3d ago
@RadicalAnthro not your fault it’s almost certainly a zoom problem