Object structure
Title:

Old-New Colonial Tendencies in Social Anthropology: Empathy in Wartime

Creator:

Buyskykh, Julia

Publisher:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

Place of publishing:

Warsaw

Date issued/created:

2023

Description:

24 cm

Type of object:

Journal/Article

Subject and Keywords:

Ukraine ; war ; empathy ; emotional testimony ; insider’s perspective ; colonialism ; west-plaining

Abstract:

Taking autoethnographic and reflexive approaches as a background, this article reflects on the tendency of a number of Western Anglophone academic writings to impose a patronising perspective on, and indeed try to silence, commentary on Ukraine concerning the ongoing Russian invasion. This line of argumentation has become known as “westplaining”, and it seems to have taken the place of the old “orientalism”. Such interventions neglect or elide the variety of regional perspectives and their entangled histories, embodied experiences and emotional contexts that are all too germane to those of us who have been doing fieldwork in Ukraine for years now. Such a regrettable imposition of ill-equipped “westplaining” thinking results in a presentation of a distanced, patronising, sometimes partisan and too-commonly facile view of the complexity of current events. Through ostensibly disinterested and compassionate appeals to listen to the “western” perspective first, the local insiders’ voices are effectively silenced. In contrast, I discuss the importance of emotional testimonies and active empathy in social anthropology as responses to collective evil and violence, and as one possible way to overcome the borders that intellectual colonialism creates within the academic community.

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Relation:

Ethnologia Polona

Volume:

44

Start page:

55

End page:

85

Resource type:

Text

Detailed Resource Type:

Article

Format:

application/octet-stream

Resource Identifier:

0137-4079 ; eISSN 2719-6976 ; doi:10.23858/ethp.2023.44.3366

Source:

IAiE PAN, call no. P 366 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 367 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 368 ; click here to follow the link

Language:

eng

Rights:

Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Terms of use:

Copyright-protected material. [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] May be used within the scope specified in Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, full text available at: ; -

Digitizing institution:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

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Library of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

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