Annual Roundtable "ANTHROPOLOGY AND POLICY: ABUNDANCE AFTER AUSTERITY, OR…"
Conference
Date: Friday 17 October 2025
Time: 09.30 – 16.30
Location: Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (SCORE)
Annual Roundtable "ANTHROPOLOGY AND POLICY: ABUNDANCE AFTER AUSTERITY, OR… WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE? OR, GRASSROOTS SPECIALITY?"
Due to its historical connection to colonialism, anthropology has long been chastened in its ability, and even desire, to contribute to local and global policy discussions. Post-structuralist anthropology's focus on “irreducible difference” further complicated these forms of engagement since policy-makers inevitably lean toward “one-size fits all” solutions anathema to anthropology’s central aims. Can policy makers be pulled closer to our own axiomatic beliefs in nuanced and complex approaches to solving both local and global challenges? Or do we need to better translate the tools we have developed over the years, so as to open up cross-cultural solutions to global policy challenges?
Our roundtable proposes to dive into these thorny issues of anthropology’s relevance outside the academy by springboarding off of the recent policy proposal published in Gustav Peebles and Ben Luzzatto’s book, The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons (MIT Press, 2025). The book offers an example of finding grassroots, locally-based, solutions that are built off of insights and theories gleaned from decades of anthropological research, while also trying to place these ideas in a more popular idiom. Our first panel will scrutinize the book from interdisciplinary perspectives, while our second panel will focus on the future of anthropology and policy more generally.
Using the book as one example of many, we are particularly excited to probe what it would look like if we approached global policy solutions through the lens of anthropological concerns with abundance and the sacred, two obvious examples of phenomena that are entirely real, but elude quantification and are thus rendered inaccessible to other disciplines. As such, abundance and sacrality represent two obvious spaces for anthropological intervention, while also offering up distinct counterpoints to economists’ foundational belief in a world constituted by scarcity, and thus governed via austerity.
More details will follow concerning guidelines for speakers, registration, and other issues.
Last updated: August 13, 2025
Source: Department of Social Anthropology