| | BIOGRAPHY OF GAVIN SMITH |
My central interest within social anthropology remains what it was in my book Livelihood and Resistance (1989) - the relationship between people's forms of "livelihood" and the forms of their collective political praxis. I continue to feel that the kinds of social relationships, institutions, and daily practices that people are engaged in to make their living, have a crucial influence on the kind of collectivities that come into being on the political stage. And conversely, I believe that these political collectivities (or their absence) provide the possibilities within which people can retain, assert or expand their control over livelihood. What has changed is that to my original Andean focus I have added a central interest in these issues as they are played out in Western Europe, and, to a lesser extent, rural Mexico.
In the book published in 1999 - Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology - I try to use the shift I have made from South America to Europe a useful grounding for exploring tensions and dilemmas in today's anthropology, especially for those who seek some political commitment in their work. My research has been focussed recently on the informal economies and regional economies of Spain and Italy, and I am in the process of writing up this material. Here I seek to use the material from this ethnography to critique the way social scientists have produced rather powerful but nonetheless restricted concepts for understanding the social economy we live in. As this project winds down I am turning attention to a different way of exploring the effects of limitations in social science conceptualizations. This time I am 'studying up', by looking at the way in which institutions at different levels in the European Union employ social science academics for knowledge production, through quite closely shaped grant offerings. This latter project is in its early stage of formulation.
Recent Writing:
Edited with Gerald Sider: Between History and Histories: the making of silences and commemorations. Toronto University Press. (1997)
Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology.
Berg, Oxford. (1999)