Spotlight on ERC projects in anthropology
Anthropology is a dynamic discipline that is rooted in the social sciences with strong ties to the humanities and the natural sciences. With its focus on lived realities and fine-grained ethnographic and comparative methods, anthropology is poised to make a substantive contribution to crucial questions about society, counterbalancing the abstract and numerical knowledge of cultural, political and societal transformations.
Initially, anthropology has essentially been about doing ‘field research’ in remote places to record the material practices, ecological adaptation, marriage patterns, religious beliefs, and legal habits of ‘exotic’ cultures. However, contemporary anthropology has become much more than the study of ‘traditional’ societies. Today, cultures are regarded as informed and shaped by all sorts of global influences. It is this interaction between cultures that captures the focus of contemporary anthropologists.
To date, the European Research Council (ERC) has supported close to 200 projects in anthropology and its manifold branches such as palaeoanthropology and anthropological linguistics, and ethnographies of emerging fields of study such as powerful elites, social movements, and larger entities like transnational corporations and state bureaucracies.
This brochure has been published on the occasion of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) Inter-Congress, taking place from 4 to 9 May 2016 in Dubrovnik (Croatia).
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