Colloquium Anthropological Crossroads

The weekly colloquium in social anthropology explores ways of using the ethnographic imagination to better understand the contemporary world order and its shifting cultural, political, and economic trends. Recent ethnographies of late capitalism depict the intersection of main road arteries in urban landscapes as key sites for the imagination, contestation, and actualization of various kinds of new worlds. Our colloquium borrows this idea of the “crossroad” as a locus of myriad actual and virtual possibilities to build a space dedicated to emerging forms of ethnographic imagination. Located on a tri-state boarder, where Anglophone, Francophone, German and other anthropological communities of debate intersect, the colloquium of the Basel Institute of Social Anthropology sets in dialogue scholarship from the global North and the global South, scholarly and public settings, the discipline’s core and its margins.