THEME FOR THE 10TH ANNUAL WHY THE WORLD NEEDS ANTHROPOLOGISTS

Re/Generation 

Obsolescence – planned and unplanned – haunts our societies and the contemporary global moment. As traditional capitalist business models of product development and creation continue to fill the consumer markets with products and appliances that break weeks after their warranty ends, the landfills overflow with stuff that should be repaired and reused, but is instead discarded. Sustainability efforts at reduction and reuse seem increasingly insufficient in addressing challenges deeply rooted in cultures of wastefulness and mutually reinforced dominant paradigms, such as human-centricity, extraction, and linear growth – paradigms in need of reworking with reciprocity and kinship across systems and categories in mind.  As environmental degradation persists, the entire planet is entering an ostensible end-game phase of obsolescence. “We cannot inherit!” seems to be the unspoken implication of the status quo. In part because a lot of what was taken for granted in the past will become unavailable in the future, and in part because there is what appears to be a revolt along generational lines with youth leading the way for an activist refusal to inherit. In an as yet pandemic reality, coronavirus has forced to the fore the threat of the obsolescence of business-as-usual logics permeating the world of business, innovation, policy, and organizations in every sector, and has exposed how unprepared they are for the uncertainties on an unsettled world. Thirdly, as big data and algorithms seem to dominate the methods of the hour, ethnography as an embodied form of inquiry itself seems to be in danger of becoming obsolete. Why would the world need anthropologists indeed in these times of damage and decay, dystopia and despair, death and digitization?

Furthermore and newly, global talking points inevitably move on; coronavirus gives way to the war in Ukraine, women’s bodily autonomy and civil rights of ethnic minorities in the West continue to be slashed across Euro-America. It has opened the world’s eyes to the complex nature of how force can bring large, stable nations and communities to their knees. It has also opened fault-lines exposing the contradictions of how people, communities, organizations and entire continents treat violence and conflict. Countries in the global south which have suffered insurmountable pillaging and intervention from bullish forces look on with dignified solidarity at countries and communities in the north encountering what they have for, in some cases, decades. From the speed of physical mobilization of people to volunteer their efforts, to diplomatic mobilization of leaders to share resources, and digital and creative mobilization of actors to use the internet and culture to bolster solidarity and raise money for causes, this year should serve as an example of how anthropologists can turn their efforts to appraising the global approach to violence with a view towards parity.

Anthropology is a discipline like no other in tackling problems precisely due to our tolerance and understanding of complexity and emergence and our ability to see things from different angles and in various perspectives. Applying anthropology to such problems rearranges the terms in which they are operationalized – and therefore solved. In that, applied anthropologists have always been as shrewd consultants of change as they have been passionate activists for change.

Generational assumptions and logic permeate most building blocks of our contemporary understanding of phenomena as varied as consumption patterns and climate change. In business and in life, we make sense of phenomena in terms of their cycles, permanence, recurrences and discontinuations. In cohort thinking, these understandings are reinforced – we are influenced by our peers, people who share similar experiences in space and time. 

Generational thinking is everywhere: from the perpetual drive of business to push “the next generation technology” – thus fuelling cultures of obsolescence – to an incessant buzz around how Gen Z drives forward the sustainability transformation of companies, from luxury brands to humble everyday products; from an ever louder critique of boomers being complicit – through overspending and overconsumption – in coming economic and environmental dystopias, to the ubiquity of “digital natives” as the meta-generation of all those who grew up with software as general purpose technology. Regularly operationalized so it can lend itself to marketing segmentation, yet notoriously hard to define, in the great churn that is culture generation becomes a convention and stereotype with broadly adopted yet volatile cultural currency (really, what is the fundamental difference between someone born in the last year of Gen X, and someone born in the first year of Gen Y and will that fundamentally impact their purchasing habits?). 

In popular media, commentators argue the concept must be done away with. Futurists implore us to aspire to be better ancestors. Economists note with alarm the knock-on effect that living with one’s parents until 40, itself oft-blamed on the delinquencies of neoliberal economic systems, is hurting the economy. As more and more people from generations Y and Z are foregoing biological reproduction, or rearranging indeed the terms of creating a family, demographers are at a loss how to predict fertility rates and what to advise on people issues on the fast depleting lower half of population pyramids of OECD countries. This has wide-ranging implications – from what that means in human resources and the meanings of age-appropriate career tracks, to how it changes the patterns of consumption and how that is represented and sold in marketing and advertising. 

What is more, generation is enmeshed with questions of sustainability, circularity, and environment. That we are fast running out of alphabet to designate the generations to come seems to carry with itself some sort of almost appropriate existential nihilism, arguably suited for a world damaged in both planetary and social terms. What will come after Z, given environmental degradation? Threaded through the riff of generation as a condition for life, policy, and business is that of ecology and environment, as evident in growing movements such as “Fridays for the Future” and “Parents for the Future.” It is more and more evident that humans have never been kin only with their own bloodlines within their own species and their historical cohorts, but also with non-human actors and living systems.

Generation (as an index and measure of human capital and social and cultural change, and as a denominator of shared experiences, rather than a simplistic age-based segmentation) and regeneration (as process of circling back and making use of the old in creating the new) –  are about the non-linearity and the more-than-human-centricity of relations.  It’s about the uses of the old in innovation and design, and a fundamental rework of commonly held ideas about the shapes, meanings, and materializations of both innovation and progress. 

Re/generation, then, is about the links and cycles that beg the operationalisation of an expanded notion of kinship and ecosystems; of heritability, consequences and responsibility; of repair and reinvention; and of rehabilitation and sufficiency in the various sectors whose attention it has already attracted – from agriculture, textiles, and tech to finance, architecture, and healthcare. 

This year’s WWNA wants to capture these re/generational entanglements as an inspiration and to join the conversation already underway in these sectors. We want to draw on anthropology’s depth and breadth of theoretical and ethnographic knowledge about relations, kinship, time, capital, and materialities,  and to demonstrate that applying this breadth and depth to various domains has a direct material import and practical impact to business, think tanks, organizations, and ecosystems – in helping solving their problems and in making the world a better place. 

How do stakeholders (communities, businesses, government, activists) currently approach re/generation, and how might an anthropologist usefully intervene? What new knowledge would be created in the process, and what actions and decisions would follow on? In what ways does re/generation offer an opportunity to decolonize our current mindsets and models about kinship, lifecycles and relationships between humans and the environment, and systems of value creation and value exchange? What is the business and social case for that? Even most urgently, how do these conversations play out against the unfolding backdrop on the pandemic and post-pandemic world, from which individuals, businesses, communities, and organizations are emerging? 

The conference will run on FOUR tracks, no longer just the three. Below is a non-exhaustive list of questions of interest. Additional takes on the sub-themes of each track are welcome.