Anthropos and the Material: Challenges to Anthropology

The main thrust of this project has been to explore the intersections between humans and the material. The project has been organised around three parallel themes: domestication practices, economic practices, and ritual practices. Each of these has be explored in relation to a perspective that treats humans and materials as always and already enmeshed. Although completed, participants in the project continue to working on publications and of finding new ways of continuing collaborations.

The main thrust of this project is to explore the intersections between humans and the material. We focus on changing perceptions and figurations of the anthropos, particularly in relation to its material aspects of existence, i.e. its relations to the en vironment broadly defined. The project is organized around three parallel themes: domestication practices, economic practices, and ritual practices. Each of these will be explored in relation to a perspective that perceives humans and materials as always and already enmeshed. The project thus aims to shed light on the changing constitutions of the anthropos, and how it relates to and relies upon its material conditions of existence, and thus to contribute to crafting an anthropology that is better able t o capture these conditions and processes. The members of the network bring with them a focus on different topics: on material forces and relations of dependency to attempts to theorize sociality, as well as globalization and how 'worlds are held together ' to more recent foci on domestication processes, local forms of global reforestation projects and questions related to the multiplicity of global financial, environmental and cultural crises. Some basic assumptions will tie them together and give shape t o the project: -What significance do various approaches to materiality and materialisations have for comparative studies of the human existential condition? -How can the field of anthropology contribute to conceptualizing, studying, and writing 'the mate rial'? -What are the theoretical implications of the current shifts, and what is the edge through which anthropology can make a difference? -How can attention to materiality help us to rethink anthropos in anthropology? By setting up a common research fo cus within all the three domains we will ensure that the research across the three domains will yield comparable insights of theoretical value.