Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
of an In/Discipline
John Comaroff
ABSTRACT The “End of Anthropology” has been predicted many times and for many different reasons—among
them, its disappearing object of study, its political implication in colonialism, the loss of its distinctive concepts,
and the effects of globalization in diffusing its received subject matter. And yet, both institutionally and
discursively,
the discipline is very much alive, producing new species of knowledge, new theoretical discourses, new
empirical
interests, new arguments. How, in light of this, do we read the history of its present? By what means is its “end”
to be avoided, its future(s) assured? Where should it go from here, empirically, methodologically, theoretically?
One answer lies in a new indiscipline, a discourse that, in dialectic tension with the contemporary world in which
it is embedded, redefines the scale, the conceptual foundations, and the techniques of knowledge production of
anthropology.
Keywords: disciplinarity, ethnography, spatial and temporal scales