Alter-Politics Reconsidered: From Different Worlds to Osmotic Worlding
Kathinka Frøystad criticizes the tendency of anchoring the alter-political imagination of alternative futures in studies of radical alterity of the kind favored by a vocal section of the ontological turn. Such studies are certainly useful for reassessing
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Alter-Politics Reconsidered: From Different Worlds to Osmotic Worlding Kathinka Frøystad Gone are the days in which anthropological research into radically different societies could be justified as documenting “experiments in living”, as famously phrased by MacBeath (1952). Today it hardly even suffices to explain the importance of fieldwork as a means to unsettle well-established analytical concepts and frameworks. The sense of urgency that characterizes our present times has brought about a heightened quest for global political relevance—for us all, here, now, in the future. Contemporary anthropological studies of non-Western societies are thus increasingly designed, justified, and discussed in terms of their potential to help identifying crisis-perpetuating blind spots of the rapidly globalizing EuroAmerican lifestyles and nurture the imagination of alternative futures. While there are many reasons to welcome this development, the question I raise in this chapter is whether the anthropological approaches currently promoted as essential for addressing a certain global crisis may inadvertently reinforce the thought pattern that underpins another but equally acute global crisis.
K. Frøystad (*) Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway © The Author(s) 2016 B.E. Bertelsen, S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_10
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Not that the quest for global relevance is entirely new. If Ernest Gellner is to be believed, it extends all the way back to Malinowski: “He [Malinowski] never wrote a book called ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific and the Polish Question’, or even ‘The Sexual Lives of Savages and the Polish Question’. But we should not be deceived. He did really” (Gellner 1995, 99). Ever since then the desirability of politically motivated anthropology has ebbed and flowed, occasionally resulting in passionate debates such as that between Roy D’Andrade (1995) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995) in Current Anthropology. What is indisputably new, however, is the widespread sense of urgency, the growing requirement for political relevance within the agencies that fund anthropological research, and the mounting anthropological insistence that even research into the most different of thought systems should be done for political reasons, be it the epistemological self-determination of those we study (Holbraad et al. 2014; but see also Todd 2014) or for addressing the crises of our times. Ghassan Hage (2012, 2015) attempts to sharpen the quest for political relevance further by coining the conceptual dichotomy of anti- and alter-politics, where anti-politics refers to approaches that challenge the existing social order (Marxist anthropology being his primary example) and alter-politics refers to the far more challenging task of imagining sufficiently bold alternatives. In the present era of global warming and unrelenting capitalist exploitation, he argues, the necessity of explo
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