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Critique refigured: art, activism, and politics in post-recession Dublin

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Morningstar, Natalie 
Moringstar, Natalie  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3950-1457

Abstract

This article argues that the anthropology of critique has been hampered by an implicit framing of critique as the content of knowledge rather than an orientation to knowledge about the world. It does so building on an ethnographic account of a group of critical citizens in post-recession Dublin, Ireland. It stages a comparison between two different forms of critique of importance to them: art and activism. Contrary to the assumption that activism and detachment, and moral advocacy and empiricism, are at odds, this ethnographic comparison reveals that here, the ultimate critical skill is thought to be the ability to take up different critical attitudes. Moreover, it isn’t a lack of detachment but the creation of a ‘critical community’ that makes critique political. Drawing from this ethnographic instance of what counts as critique, this article thus makes a case for an anthropology of critique as itself a critical practice—one that is becoming increasingly urgent as critique as we know it has come to exhibit a hegemony of form in the social sciences and public cultures of debate.

Description

Keywords

4301 Archaeology, 4401 Anthropology, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society

Journal Title

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1359-0987
1467-9655

Volume Title

Publisher

Wiley
Sponsorship
ESRC (ES/V01191X/1)