The Nomadism of Social Anthropologists

While anthropologists of the past decades have devoted increasing attention both to questions of reflexivity and to people “on the move” such as migrants, relatively little attention has focused on the geographical and cultural movement of social anthropologists themselves, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even if there is growing interest in non-hegemonic anthropologies by scholars who have often lived in several countries and recent work on “the ethnographic self as resource” argues that anthropologists’ personal experiences provide potentially insightful ethnographic data that can enrich their scientific analysis, the consequences of past and present anthropologists’ nomadism on their own research – including their training, career and grant opportunities – have not been thoroughly analysed. It is common knowledge that today, in Europe and beyond, being “on the move” has increasingly become a part of many anthropologists’ lives