Tilting relationalities: Exploring the world through possible futures of agriculture

‘Avatars and Robots: The Imaginary Present and the Socialities of the Inorganic’

‘The Truths of Anthropology’

Let’s start with a deceptively simple question: is truth the aim of our inquiries? If the search for truth is an impossible one then what is the purpose of our endeavours? Some have suggested that truth does not exist, that it cannot be more than relative or subjective. In these arguments there is often an untimely slippage between the idea that truth is unstable, absolutely not absolute, and the view that truth is therefore not something to be sought, not something worth bothering about.

‘On Being Young’

I want to suggest that there are three key areas of theoretical difficulty: how to theorise children’s agency, how to theorise their rights, and how to theorise the nature of the ‘child’ itself. These are not new theoretical questions. They are all interconnected, and they link to and underpin such diverse domains of enquiry as children and social policy, war trauma and child soldiers, cognitive development, language use, sexuality and labour.

‘Global anxieties: concept-metaphors and pre-theoretical commitments in anthropology’

This article begins by interrogating the problem of the globa land the local in anthropology, and asks how their interconnections might be theorized. When anthropologists call for an examination of the global in concrete terms, they often fail to appreciate the place of ‘concept-metaphors’ whose purpose is to maintain ambiguity and a productive tension between universal claims and specific historical contexts.