The Hong Kong Anthropological Society
in association with
The Hong Kong Museum of History*
Presents
Will We Ever Have a Global Anthropology?
An anthropological lecture by Gordon MATHEWS
Friday, 18 July at 7:00 p.m. sharp
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui
All are welcome! Space, however, is limited to 139 seats.
The lecture is conducted in English.
In the late 19th century, the founders of anthropology Morgan and Tylor postulated that the United States and Europe were at the high point of contemporary civilization, with other societies in the world at various stages behind them in “savagery” and “barbarism.” Anthropologists in later decades wholly repudiated these ethnocentric views, but today we are living them out again, not intellectually but institutionally. Because of the increasing importance of global university rankings and citation indexes, anthropologists around the world are increasingly being forced to write in English for top-ranked Anglo-American journals if they want to keep their jobs and get promoted. This is Morgan and Tylor all over again: “West is Best.”
In this talk, Gordon Mathews examines the prospects for whether anthropology can become a discipline not of the rich studying the poor of the world and the poor intellectually emulating the rich, but rather a truly global discipline. When can we have an anthropology not just for the West but for the world? This process is already underway; the future of anthropology as a discipline depends upon its success.
Gordon Mathews, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations and Co-Chair of the World Anthropological Union.
For more information, please contact
YW50aHJvaGsgfCBnbWFpbCAhIGNvbQ==, www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/hkas,
www.facebook.com/hkanthro,@HKASTalks
* The Museum makes no representations on the content of this lecture.
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