[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar Wednesday September 24

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology seminar: 9.30 am Wednesday September 24, Coombs Seminar Room A

Chris Houston, Macquarie University

'An Anti-History of a Non-People: Kurds, Colonialism and
Nationalism in the History of Anthropology'
 
In this paper I seek to contest certain aspects of the 1960s
revisionist history of the discipline of anthropology, narratives that
can be accused ironically of an autocentric overestimation of the power
of the colonial West in their very uncovering of its more or less hidden
influence over the genre of ethnography and anthropological practise. I
suggest that in the case of the anthropology of the Kurds at least, not
only have Western ethnographic texts been relatively un-influential in
the wider scheme of discourse about Kurds, but that the recent decision
of Kurdish publishing houses in Istanbul to translate and re-publish
them indicates where in the present many Kurds feel an active
Œcolonial project¹ is continuing. The role and development of
anthropology in Turkey then complicates this by now decades-old
examination of the embeddedness of ethnographic discourse in Western
modernist projects of political transformation.

All welcome. 


____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/

Information about the Master of Visual Culture Research
is available at: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/vcr.php