IN FOCUS: (NOT) THE END OF ANTHROPOLOGY,

AGAIN? SOME THOUGHTS ON DISCIPLINARY FUTURES

Introduction to “In Focus: (Not) The End of Anthropology,
Again? Some Thoughts on Disciplinary Futures”
John Comaroff and Karl-Heinz Kohl

ABSTRACT The three articles published here grew out of talks originally delivered in Frankfurt as part of the Jensen
Memorial Lecture series of 2008, which took “The End of Anthropology?” as their topic. The title of this In Focus has
been amended to make plain that none of the authors believe that the discipline is about to die, at least not in the
foreseeable future as was once believed possible by such luminaries as Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Each, rather, offers a provocative reading of the present and future of anthropology: of its raison d’être, of the sorts
of substantive problems it might address in times to come, of the discursive strategies and the epistemic practices
that it might develop in the early years of the 21st century.

Keywords: anthropology, disciplinary futures, Jensen Memorial Lectures

T he articles published here began life as three in the se-

ries of Jensen Memorial Lectures held at the Frobenius
Institute, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, in Frankfurt
am Main during the spring of 2008. The series, coordi-
nated by Professor Karl-Heinz Kohl, was entitled “The End
of Anthropology?” The other lectures in that series are be-
ing published in a special issue of Paideuma, the journal of
the Frobenius Institute, under the title “The End of An-
thropology: An Endless Debate.”1 Appositely, perhaps, the
interrogative has been displaced by a period, a hopeful full-
stop perhaps. After all, the debate may indeed be endless,
but many of us believe that we have long known the an-
swer to the question underlying it. For some, no doubt, that
question is not even worth asking.
In his original letter of invitation to participants in the
Jensen Memorial Lectures, Karl-Heinz Kohl noted that talk
of crisis in anthropology goes back to the late 19th century—
to the dawn, almost, of the discipline in its modern form.
“Already in 1883,” he wrote, “Adolf Bastian spoke of ‘the
conflagration of civilization’ which would wipe out the last
primitive peoples,” and, with those peoples, the discipline
that studies them. It was a prognosis later to be echoed—
famously, if in rather different terms—by Margaret Mead
and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In more recent times, crisis talk,
which has waxed and waned over the years, has had less to
do with the extinction of our objects of study than with our
mode of knowledge production and the politics and ethics of
representation it entails. The Jensen Memorial Lecturers of
2008 were asked, in very bald terms, “What is the point of
continuing with the anthropological project? Have we finally
reached the end of anthropology? Has its world finally fallen
to pieces, leaving its great integrative, totalizing concepts—
such as tradition, identity, religion, culture, and society—in
useless shambles?” Or, more positively, is the dissolution of
its “classical fields of study” opening up new possibilities, new
domains of inquiry? Interestingly, the 107th Annual Meeting
of the American Anthropological Association independently
took as its theme for 2008 “The End/s of Anthropology,”
echoing—if not in its precise formulation, then certainly in
its spirit—some of the concerns that lay behind the Jensen
Memorial Lectures.
The authors of the articles published here, Andre Gin-
grich, Ulf Hannerz, and John Comaroff, shared several views
about the topic of the Jensen Lectures and the animating idea
behind them. One was a measure of impatience, a weariness
even, at the anachronism and the apologetics—not to men-
tion the air of defensiveness—that surround so much crisis
talk in anthropology, past and present. They, like other con-
tributors to the Jensen Lectures, addressed themselves less
to the question of finalities, to “The End,” than to the creative
pursuit of new ends. Hence the title here, “(Not) The End of
Anthropology, Again? Some Thoughts on Disciplinary Fu-
tures.” Its irony speaks for itself. The three articles included
in this In Focus seek to explore those futures in a manner

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 4, pp. 522–523, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. 
c 2010 by the American Anthropological
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01272.x
 Comaroff and Kohl • Introduction 523

at once provocative, polyvocal, and open ended. The point

John Comaroff Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago,
is to reinsert the question mark. Not, patently, to ask yet
Chicago, IL 60637; American Bar Foundation, Chicago, IL 60611; De-
again whether the discipline is about to die—which is highly
partment of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, Cape
unlikely anyway—but to think aloud about the quality of its
Town 7701, South Africa
life-yet-to-be-lived. In short, to turn “An Endless Debate”
Karl-Heinz Kohl Institut für Ethnologie, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
into a debate about the ends and means of anthropology as
am Main, 60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
it breaches the 21st century. Which was the objective of the
Jensen Memorial Lectures to begin with.