CAS and Edinburgh University Anthropology Roundtable Debate Think smaller: what regions can offer in an age of planetary crisis
This roundtable invites anthropologists with years of working in a particular region to ask what might be recovered from thinking with a region.
The discussion brings together anthropologists who are experts in Europe, PNG, South Asia, East Asia and Latin America, not to rehearse area studies in its older colonial or institutional forms, but to respond to the planetary with the tools that regional intellectual traditions can offer. How can we respond to the planetary using mid-level concepts forged in particular landscapes of inquiry? What can we learn, not only from one another as individual scholars, but as individuals who intersect different geographic and academic traditions?
Rather than asking anthropology to think bigger, act more directly, or look for inspiration in the fine grain, this roundtable is an invitation to dwell in the middle, to test out our voices as regional experts, not as a retreat from planetary stakes, but as a way of finding different traction on them.