We are delighted to announce that the next biennial conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society (FAS), which marks the 50th anniversary of the society, will be held in Helsinki from 16-18 June 2025. It will feature Soumhya Venkatesan as the Keynote Lecturer for the conference, and Tom Boellstorff will give the annual Westermarck Lecture during the conference.
We warmly welcome proposals for both panels and films. Deadline for call for panels is 19th November 2024. Calls for individual papers will be announced on 5th December 2024.
Conference Theme: Comparisons
Comparison is political: it can generate assertions, judgements, impressions, hierarchies, critiques and questions that might lead to challenges to the status quo. Comparison is also impossible: what criteria are being used to compare and what is comparison for (Candea 2019)? These conditions make comparison(s) simultaneously essential, intriguing and disputed in anthropology, which makes them worthy as the theme for this conference.
Teresia Teaiwa (2006) has argued that comparative analysis ought to be viewed as a “path to humanism”, a way of making sure we learn from the past. Yet she also noted that comparisons and analogies reduce “complex histories and realities to simple characteristics and features”.
This captures a paradox at the core of comparisons, one that particularly affects anthropology. Anthropology’s comparative method invites us to “trim down and ‘control’ the plethora of material, drawing it back from a sense of infinite expansion” and focus on the main point (Strathern 2009). Webb Keane (2014) suggests that comparison involves the ability to think with others’ ethnographies along with our own from the constant movement between the intimacy of fieldwork and the distant gaze of theorists.
Two of the most important comparative projects in anthropology are “comparison” in the sense of finding commonalities, and comparison-as-contrast. Finding commonalities can generate political analogies, but also creates common denominators, classifies, and generalises, whereas finding contrasts works across often significant differences such as legal documents compared to Fijian mat weaving (Riles 1998).
Which brings us to a third comparative project: studying comparison itself as a practice used by people to navigate their daily lives, which often act as inspiration for our own theories of comparison and contrast. Specifically, how encounters between (more-than)humans can be shaped by practices of contrast and comparison. For example, essentialising differences between one group of people and another can be used to justify colonialism and appropriation of resources. Yet it is also possible to develop comparison as a method of recognizing how differences between self and other are constructed and, in doing so, opens the possibility for change.
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Link to Conference’s website : https://blogs.helsinki.fi/fasconference2025/
