Notes from Belgrade: Social Anthropology for Archaeology Students in a Post-Conflict Society

Social anthropology courses, some elective and some mandatory, for archaeology students at the Department of Archaeology, University of Belgrade, commenced only after 2003. Since Serbian society opened itself from its isolation, the key challenge has been to teach new generations who have grown up during the civil wars in Former Yugoslavia to recognize broader perspectives on human cultures, universalities, and differences. Anthropology has been consequently utilized as a prominent tool for cultural relativism, multiculturalism, ‘Otherness’, and reflexive thinking. However much these facets have all proved necessary, they seem to have fallen to the wayside in ‘post-truth’ world. It has therefore become unclear in teaching how to address the phenomenon. This paper aims to critically discuss anachronous traditions in social and physical anthropology in combination with new challenges of the biologisation of social identities in archaeology and social anthropology.

Malinowski and Mauss Exchanging Knowledge in Interwar Europe

Bronisław Malinowski sought throughout his career to make a scientific contribution to understanding and reforming the international order by making analogies with ‘primitive’ societies. His ethnographic material was important to Marcel Mauss’s internationalist project in The Gift, and can still provide lessons in internationalism. This article examines Malinowski’s ethnographic figuration of ‘the evolution of primitive international law’, and documents a set of intellectual exchanges between him and Mauss. This illuminates an unexpected avenue of Durkheimian influence on British social anthropology and situates Malinowski in contemporary imperial and internationalist debates. Despite Malinowski’s early criticism of Émile Durkheim’s account of ‘collective ideas’, his later writing shows the (unacknowledged) influence of Mauss’s understandings of obligation and intersocial exchange. Unearthing the terms of this exchange between Malinowski and Mauss helps to recover the central normative lesson of the former’s final book and his ethnographic work as a whole – namely, that sovereignty should be dethroned as an organising principle of international order in favour of intersocial exchange and the obligations it produces.

The Interpretation of “Local” Literacy Practices through Ethnography

Ethnography is a practice of inscribing local practice into texts, developed in the context of social anthropology. Local literacy practices often remain hidden, dependent on context and shaped by histories and cultures. Literacy is entwined with how lives are lived. Collaborative ethnography enables an approach that permits researchers to collaboratively develop research questions with participants and, rather than researching on people, researchers work with people as coresearchers. Local literacy practices are situated in homes and communities as well as within everyday contexts such as markets and mosques. Community literacy practices can be collaboratively understood and studied using this approach. Communities experience and practice diverse and multiple literacies, both locally and transnationally, and mapping this diversity is key to an understanding of the fluid and changing nature of literacies. Literacies can be understood as being multilingual, digital, transnational, and multimodal, thus expanding the concept of literacy as lived within communities. Threaded through this analysis is a discussion of power and whose literacy practices are seen as powerful within community contexts. Collaborative ethnography is a powerful methodology to excavate and co-analyze community literacy practices. Other methods that can explore local literacies include visual and sensory ethnography. Power sharing in terms of the design and architecture of the research is important for hearing voices and working equitably. There are many concepts introduced within, including the idea of literacy practices, the link between literacy and identity, the importance of an understanding of multilingualism, and the importance of situating literacy in communities.

Public Funding of Research into Ethnological Activities in Andalusia (Spain): Boosting the Academic Career of Researchers

The advent of democracy in Spain and the establishment of the different autonomous communities marked the beginning of a process to transfer political, economic and other competences over Culture and Cultural Heritage. Following its creation in 1984, the Ministry of Culture of the Andalusian Autonomous Government incorporated a Directorate-General for Cultural Assets into its organisational structure and embarked on an ambitious programme of actions to support Andalusian historical heritage, including creation of a management structure, enactment of a specific heritage law and budget allocations for protection tasks. From the outset, a type of heritage little known until then emerged: ethnological heritage. Dynamic actions were also promoted to fund research into this area, including grants for ethnological activities, financing for publications and funding for ethnological symposiums. This paper analyses the different ethnological activities carried out and their funding, and assesses the extent to which this investment favoured the professional development of teaching staff in the field of Social Anthropology in Andalusia, specifying the marginal effects and differentiating them according to gender and university size using binary choice models (Logit).