Season 05 - Episode 01: Who's Afraid of Universals

In this episode,  a professor-student pair, Dr. Atreyee Majumder and Manhar Bansal, provide a glimpse into their ongoing conversation on the enduring role of universal categories and their relationship to anthropological knowledge. In light of the discomfort around universals in contemporary social sciences, we offer the provocation: can there be universals beyond those of capitalist modernity? We talk about the dominant time-space compression account of modernity, the possibility of uncovering other, more liberating and revolutionary temporalities, and the fun of doing theory in anthropology. We argue for the need to revisit the question of universal categories to think through our time and politics, albeit on a broader canvas. Tune in to ask, along with us, who’s afraid of universals?  Episode Transcript Closed-Captioning Further Reading: Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. “Time/Space” pp 91-129. Li, Darryl. 2020. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. “Introduction” pp 1-26. Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. “Introduction” pp 1-20. Walker, Gavin, and Naoki Sakai. 2019. “The End of Area.” Positions: Asia Critique 27(1): 1–31. Credits: Writing, Production & Editing: Atreyee Majumder Executive Producer - Anar Parikh Thumbnail Image: "Railroad Sunset" by Edward Hopper (1929) Featured Music: "Air on a G String" by J.S. Bach

Om Podcasten

Anthropological Airwaves is the official podcast of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. It is a venue for highlighting the polyphony of voices across the discipline’s four fields and the infinite—and often overlapping—subfields within them. Through conversations, experiments in sonic ethnography, ethnographic journalism, and other (primarily but not exclusively) aural formats, Anthropological Airwaves endeavors to explore the conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical issues that shape anthropology’s past, present, and future; experiment with new ways of conversing, listening, and asking questions; and collaboratively and collectively push the boundaries of what constitutes anthropological knowledge production. Anthropological Airwaves shares the journal’s commitment to advancing research on the archaeological, biological, linguistic, and sociocultural aspects of the human experience by featuring the work of those who study and practice anthropology within and beyond the academy.