Why “reassembling” anthropology?

The Reassembling Anthropology Project explores the ways in which anthropologists from the Global South reinvent their modes of conducting research amid the precarities, obligations, and neoliberal regimes that have reshaped the material and affective conditions of academic life. In a landscape marked by labor precarity, administrative overload, and the growing reduction of knowledge to metrics of productivity and efficiency, many scholars—particularly those based in the “peripheries” of the global academic system—are compelled to develop creative and collaborative strategies to sustain their intellectual work.

These practices, often rendered invisible or delegitimized for not conforming to disciplinary standards, can nevertheless reveal remarkable epistemological and methodological potential. Reassembling Anthropology Project seeks precisely to shed light on these modes of anthropological inquiry that emerge from the margins of the neoliberal academia: modes of work that, operating amid scarcity, uncertainty, and multiple responsibilities, expand our understanding of what counts as anthropological knowledge and enrich the methodological toolbox of global anthropology.

This project draws on reflections and experiences from diverse origins. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the so-called “patchwork ethnography” emerged as a theoretical and methodological proposition that urged scholars to reconsider and reveal “how changing living and working conditions are profoundly and irrevocably changing knowledge production (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe, 2020). Forged in a context of vulnerability and restricted mobility, this current did not merely respond to the challenges posed to “traditional fieldwork”; rather, it opened a space for reflection on the very conditions of existence of those who practice anthropology.

If patchwork ethnography requires a verb, that verb is “to reassemble”: that is, to openly reassemble anthropological work with the multifaceted lives and responsibilities of its practitioners. In other words, to reassemble what is inherently connected but which some disciplinary fictions and formalities tend to separate, ignore, or conceal. This reassembly allows us to situate the multiple roles and obligations assumed by anthropologists in adverse scenarios as part of a broader continuum, highlighting how the resources, traits, and potentialities of each responsibility intertwine in the field and in research in unexpected ways. Such reassembling can help anthropologists perceive connections, disjunctions, and possibilities that would remain unimaginable from a singular, isolated position.

In this way, the Reassembling Anthropology Project seeks to connect the contemporary debate that has emerged in some areas of Anglophone anthropology with the long-standing concerns, reflections, and practices—before, during, and after the pandemic—faced by anthropologists in the Global South. How do anthropologists conduct research while navigating social pressures and increasingly restrictive university landscapes governed by neoliberal competition? What distinctive forms of methodological, ethical, and affective reassemblage emerge in these academic peripheries, where precarity becomes a structural condition of knowledge production? And perhaps more provocatively, in what ways do these peripheral reassemblages challenge and reconfigure the epistemic and ethnographic foundations that academic metropoles have long upheld as disciplinary norms? The project aims to make visible the forms of research that anthropologists carry out within academic, institutional, and social contexts marked by the precariousness not only of their “subjects of study”, but of their own lives and positions.

Drawing on interviews and conversations with anthropologists based primarily in Latin America, the Reassembling Anthropology Project seeks to unearth and bring to the surface the methodological and ethnographic innovations that are emerging in contexts that are both challenging and, at the same time, potentially fertile for experimentation and creation.

Luis Meléndez

References Günel, Gökçe, Saiba Varma, and Chika Watanabe. 2020. “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography.” Society for Cultural Anthropology. 2020. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography.

Günel, Gökçe, and Chika Watanabe. 2024. “Patchwork Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 51: 131–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13243.