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‘In Our Time, the World’s Great Problems Are Human Problems’

This September, Steve Kowalewski, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia (USA), gave a series of four lectures and seminars at HSE: ‘Motecuhzoma, Aristotle, and Keynes,’ ‘Advances in City-State Research, with an Example from Mesoamerica,’ ‘Ways of Teaching Anthropology,’ and ‘The Anthropologist as a Hero of Our Time’. They were designed to appeal to a wide range of faculty and students associated with the HSE International Centre of Anthropology, which studies social institutions, forms of political organization and cultures of peoples of the past and present in historical dynamics, in the context of local and global sociocultural history. Following the lecture series, Professor Kowalewski spoke with the HSE News Service about several of the topics he covered, his research interests, and his collaboration with Russian colleagues.

How did your cooperation with Russian colleagues and HSE start?

— In 1998, I was able to participate in an interdisciplinary conference on ‘Hierarchy and Power’ at the Russian State University for the Humanities. It was then that I became acquainted with Russian scholars who were doing significant, creative research in Anthropology and History. These were people who then became active with the History faculty at HSE. We were eventually able to involve two promising younger researchers in archaeological field projects in Mexico.

— You recently completed a series of lectures and discussions in Moscow. How did they go?

— Great! I am very impressed with the academic background, experience, dedication, interest, motivation, scientific curiosity, and critical ability of the students. In dialogue, participants learn from each other, and at HSE I may have imparted a few things to others, but I certainly gained valuable insights from their comments, questions, discussion, and criticisms.

I thank the Faculty of History for their gracious welcome and especially the International Centre of Anthropology and its staff. This Centre is a group of anthropologists who are building networks internationally and across disciplines.

— You gave a lecture entitled 'The Anthropologist as a Hero of Our Time.' What was the main message you hoped to impart?

— Anthropology is the essential Science and Humanities discipline. In our time, the world’s great problems are human problems – human in origin and human in solution. We need to understand as much of the human experience as possible, that is, the whole range of institutions and ideas that creative people have come up with, everywhere on Earth and at all times in history. We need to look outside ourselves and our own world to that greater arc of human potentialities.

An anthropological perspective means to look outward, to observe and understand other people’s worlds as they themselves see it. This anthropological perspective is a valuable kind of objectivity, not only for professional anthropologists but for anyone.

The lecture included extended examples of recent studies in which researchers used anthropological and historical methods to address major problems, build better social science and ecological theory, and have significant dialogue with the public.

— What is the role of city-states in the modern world?

— Large territorial states and empires, including the modern nation-states, are not a final stage or equilibrium solution. There are strong tendencies toward fragmentation and independence. Just ask Madrid about Barcelona, or Yugoslavia about Kosovo. And of course, there are many places such as Singapore, Luxembourg, and Bahrain.

With globalization, cities are often important international actors partly autonomous from the nation-states in which they find themselves. Many of the institutions we think of as central to our lives, such as money, corporations, democracy, associations of workers and merchants, were developed for city-state conditions.

— What are you working on now?

— I continue to write for academic outlets and the broader public about the long and complicated history of Oaxaca, Mexico. I am working on marketplaces and market economies in ancient times. I am involved with other researchers in developing an institutional approach for archaeology. We have one of the largest datasets in regional settlement pattern archaeology in the world and we are responsible for getting it properly curated and archived so that it can be widely accessed.

Anna Chernyakhovskaya, specially for HSE News service