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Session Detail (plenary)
Sir Raymond Firth Memorial Lecture by professor Joel Robbins
Anthropology between Europe and the Pacific: Change, Exchange and the Prospects for a Relationship Beyond Relativism
Joel Robbins
University of Cambridge
Perhaps more than is the case for any other world region, anthropology has played a major role in mediating the relationship between Europe and the Pacific. This has meant that changes in the wider relationship between these two regions can have a strong impact on anthropological thought, even as disciplinary changes can in some respects shape at least the European view of the Pacific. In this lecture, I consider changing anthropological understandings of this relationship and their impact on the ways anthropologists approach their studies of Pacific societies. In particular, I look at the how studies of social and cultural difference tied to notions of relativism and its critical potential have given way to a focus on local responses to broad global problems such as AIDS, climate change and increasing inequalities generated by the global economic system. In an attempt to reframe what too often appears as a choice between exoticizing particularlism and Euro-American common sense universalism, I look to Pacific models of sociality to find a relational value for difference beyond relativism that might suggest some novel grounds for thinking about the relations between Europe and the Pacific.
