Tags: activist research

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  1. A series of links and articles about how anthropology becomes when it decides to enter into action, i.e. coming out of an (impossible) “pure” observation and getting politically involved into the field it studies. In the seventies, in Italy, they used the expression “ricerca-intervento“, that translated the english “action research”. Many experiences of those times are having a continuity until today, for example the “inchiesta operaia” (worker’s inquiry) autogestionated and driven by activists or by the same people who participate of social conflicts. While the field of “applied anthropology” is being colonized by NGOs and development plans, almost always under control or even financed by the same governments, the social movements are developing some other forms of creation of knowledge.
  2. Low & Merry highlight how little attention was paid by the peer reviewers of this publication to the concepts of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ which have until now been regularly invoked as a way of legitimating ethnographic research. This may suggest that scholars are slowly recognizing that personal and political engagement in the struggles and demands of the communities they study represent an enrichment of, and not an obstacle to the production of scholarly knowledge
  3. we keep linking texts that could help us to understand the contradictions of an ethnography “within” social activism, i.e. produced inside of a direct engagement with revolutionary political movements, rejecting neutrality and the so-called ethnographic distance, toward the development of an anthropology of action.

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