Tag Archives: Gavin Smith

Gavin Smith: Out of the academic enclosure

Marc Edelman ends his recent piece on FocaalBlog, “The forces of justice and decency will need to move from feel-good slacktivism to the streets, to face-to-face engagement, whether lobbying, community organization, or classroom dialogues.” This got me thinking. In the following manner…[1]
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Gavin Smith: Chasm: Interrupted Lives

Over the last few years I have found myself talking to people who have experienced radical displacements in their lives as a result both of economic distress and of political disturbance. They have been obliged to “move on,” to “move out,” to “move away.” Yet these are not really narratives that help put order into the world we live in. They are less to do with narrative, which is a rather literary way of believing the world can be settled for us. They’re more to do with the simultaneous solidity and the elusiveness of the role place plays in these people’s lives—even when they are not there. And they’re about the slipperiness of a time-past that sometimes deceives people that it can help deal with the present, and a time-future that keeps jumping about and producing either perpetual anxiety or, simply, resignation.

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Gavin Smith: Intellectuals’ Contributions to Popular Mobilization and Strategic Action under Different Conditions of Possibility

The argument I make here is a fairly obvious one. It is that the spatially widespread insurrections in the global south during the ’60s, and especially their victories against France in Algeria, the United States in Southeast Asia, and Portugal in its various colonies, obliged anthropologists and historians on the Left to rethink the way they did anthropology: their methods, their research design, and the concepts they used. Though in many cases it may not have been explicit in their work, the fact is that they began to design their research questions in very much the same way as the issues of “What is to be done?” that insurgents themselves had laid out (or were laying out) in their various forms. Moreover, the work of this bridgehead of Left scholars had a knock-on effect on the discipline as a whole, reshaping the entire enterprise of what sociocultural anthropology was.
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