Beyond Political Anthropology. Introduction Studying and Challenging Power in the 21st Century

There are moments, in any individual lifetime, generation, or history of a civilisation, when it feels like we need different words to describe the changing world, and when old terms need new meanings. A translation of wor(l)ds: not only from one language to another, but also from the old world that is dying to the new one that has yet to come. This is how Gramsci famously defined both a “translation” and a “crisis”. And it fits perfectly to describe our worlds today: the need to cross this middle passage to a new shore, to go beyond the economic crisis, beyond traditional representative institutions and current global governmentality, beyond the ecological collapse, and surely, beyond the Covid-19 pandemic which – like other health crises which have affected (differently) more or less “lucky” regions of the world –, works like a detector of symptoms: it reveals and deepens all the other crises, but not always explains their roots and causes. This is where lie the very aims of the social sciences and the humanities (including researches debating with “natural” science, literature and arts): to offer a “radical” thinking, in its etymological meaning of going back to the root-causes; and to offer inspirations, but also practical tools, to imagine and build “that” beyond. But how is this possible, when these social sciences and humanities are themselves considered to be in crisis? This is also, more modestly, the situation of “political anthropology”. The two words that constitu