Across Anthropology

Abstract

understands these institutions as caught up in a temporal dilemma: being at the same time sites for the negotiation of contemporary identity politics and the recognition of colonial pasts, while remaining caught up in a paradoxical anachronism. "What, then, constitutes the contemporary at a time of anachronism?", he asks, prodding at the fraught relation between contemporary art, modernism, and post-modernism to think of a possible anthropology of the contemporary. Note1. We also do not intend to associate the concerns articulated in this book to those revolving around posthuman debates on robotics and artificial intelligence (Braidotti 2013; Atanasoski and Vora 2019). In this sense, our propositions are related to but distinct from experimental methodologies and analytics, such as the "alter-anthropological" (Hage 2012: 286), where "critical anthropological thought can generate new problematics (…)", and the "para-sitical" offered for debate by Deeb and Marcus (2011) to reflect on the creation of ethnographic situations.2. The research that led to this piece was also funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of the research award for Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. We are grateful to CARMAH and all colleagues who contributed to making our joint research stimulating and productive. Additionally and in particular, we wish to thank Sharon Macdonald, Thomas Fillitz, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on our introduction.