Decolonization and Its Continuous Effects on Emergent Decentered Anthropology

Rethinking Dialogism Now

Abstract

This paper is a call to reconceive the past as possibility for the future of anthropology to be decolonized and decentered. Following James Clifford's appeal to recuperating anthropological sensibilities as strategies for living otherwise in uncertain times, I also stress the importance of the idea of dialogue not only among the politically divided but also between the temporary separated: the past and the present. The demand of taking responsibility for the past cannot be denied, for example, as evidenced in the global spread of numerous movements spurred by Black Lives Matter. I narrate the history of anthropological responses to decolonization as continuous since the sixties to the present by reinterpreting such texts as Writing Culture as significant part of it. The idea of dialogue as articulated by M.M. Bakhtin offers a way to reconceptualize the decentered anthropological knowledge as responses to decolonization continuously reinvented.