iuaes 2013 - 17TH WORLD CONGRESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL UNION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL SCIENCES

The goals of the UK organizing Committee for the 2013 World Congress are that:
(1) It will be inclusive of all the sub-fields of anthropology and the interests of all anthropologists world-wide;
(2) It will provide an enduring, high-impact, statement of the importance of anthropology as a scientific discipline to international agencies, governments and the wider public throughout the world that will end, once and for all, the familiar arguments that the subject has become obsolete because of the “disappearance of the primitive” or should be considered a minor branch of sociology;
(3) It will set a strong agenda for the future development of world anthropology and be seen as a landmark event by the discipline.
A number of practical steps will be taken to achieve these goals. These will include the establishment of a press office staffed by professionals who will be able to get the message of the congress out into the public spheres of different countries, by, for example, arranging interviews with individual participants and ensuring that debates within the congress are widely reported. We will also invite non-academics with anthropology backgrounds and non-anthropologists in public life whose policy-making responsibilities are relevant to some of the Congress themes. But a crucial condition for ensuring that the Congress has the impacts we desire is that it has a clear structure, which we aim to achieve by defining six broad thematic tracks associated with plenary sessions that will take the form of debates on key issues featuring leading scholars from around the world and opportunities for those present to participate in the debates. By “leading scholars” we mean scholars who have important things to say on the topic in hand: plenary speakers will be a mix of senior and younger anthropologists.
The congress will thus consist of both plenary sessions and multiple simultaneous panels, grouped into broad thematic tracks. There may also be ad hoc workshops and discussion sessions around particular themes, which could include topics such as ethics, methodology, academic publishing and communicating with broader audiences, as well as business meetings. Inside and outside the framework provided by the formal tracks and plenaries, we may well wish to discuss anthropology's place in a globally changing university enviroonment and the politics of knowledge in which trained anthropologists are now engaged, inside and outside the academy. There will be a comprehensive program of visual anthropology, involving both film screenings and photographic exhibitions and academic panels. Special museum exhibitions will be organized to coincide with the congress (the Manchester museum, which is part of the university, is diectly across the road from the conference centre). There will also be academic sessions on museology and the anthropological study of museums.
Our intention is to provide space for the expression of all forms of anthropology, academic and applied, and the entire range of interests and scientific questions posed by a subject that explores the fundamental question of what it means to be human. But we do not simply want to celebrate diversity: we also want to show how the different sub-fields of anthropology, social, cultural, biological, ecological, demographic, lingistic, archeaological and historical, complement each other and justify Eric Wolf's claim that anthropology as a whole is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. So this congress will also have a focus on dialogue across lines of academic specialization.