Contemporary anthropology is marked by a sustained effort to rethink anthropologists' relations with the people, objects and organizations with which they work. If the myth of the innocent scientist (participating merely better to observe) was never fully credible, over the past decades it has been scrapped almost entirely. This does not mean that anthropology has abandoned its claims to scientificity, nor that the forms of knowledge we produce are merely subjective or impressionistic. To the contrary, in much contemporary thinking about the nature of our knowledge, it is precisely anthropology's reflexive, intersubjective and situated qualities that guarantee its validity and value. Anthropologists engage in processes of “give and take” in the double sense of this phrase: they both exchange ideas, experiences and value(s) with others and continually renegotiate the terms of this exchange. Anthropology is both a perspective on and a form of intervention in the world, and it is at its most powerful when it consciously reflects on its discursive and practical positionality. This complex epistemology has resulted in a multiplicity of methods, subject-positions, thematic foci and theoretical frameworks from which it can go about its business, many of which have been thoroughly discussed in the literature. In this Annual Meeting, we aim further to explore these multiple methods and themes, through panels that present specific forms of giving and of taking, and explore their varied theoretical, political, ethical, epistemological and methodological implications.
