Club Stone: Collapsing the field-desk dichotomy

Beskrivelse

This paper unfolds around a particular phenomenon - the club stone - discovered and brought into anthropological practice by Kirsten Hastrup, along with the authors of this paper, during a cross-disciplinary expedition to The North Water polynya Area in the High Arctic of Greenland, also known as Avanersuaq or Thule.
We tell the story of discovery of the club stone, and by unfolding the layers of multi-species sociality and manifold meanings that we found, the paper examines the potentials and challenges implied when collaborating across species and disciplines, across academic hierarchies, and across colonial and ecological histories. Mirroring empirical and analytical practices of anthropology in the club stone, we shed light on the intimate and subtle attentions and attitudes through which anthropology approaches the world and generates powerful knowledge and statements, and we show how a stone on a talis slope in Northwest Greenland can conceptually move through time and space, and move anthropological subjectivities and insights on its way. By doing so, the gap between field and desk in anthropological knowledge-making, is collapsed.

Periode	16 aug. 2018
Sted for afholdelse	European Association of Social Anthropologists
Grad af anerkendelse	International