Anthropology (CNRS Humanities & Social Sciences priority discipline)

The aim of this discipline is to study forms of social and cultural otherness through immersion in long and/or prolonged and repeated fieldwork requiring its practitioners to master the language(s) spoken by the people they are studying. This research primarily involves gathering knowledge from emic categories (given by the informants) and also detailed observations of ongoing phenomena. The traditional fields of ethnology/anthropology have been undergoing profound changes for many years now. The discipline no longer simply aims to produce exhaustive monographs on a population or a region of the world. Today's anthropologists concentrate on the study of objects, themes and contemporary issues that are often networked and interconnected while seeking to understand their impact on the groups, populations and individuals being studied. Anthropology has always been resolutely interdisciplinary and works in a constant dialogue with the other humanities and social sciences (history, linguistics, economics, territorial sciences, sociology, literature, art, etc.) because its researchers aim to understand all dimensions of the human being in society. Similarly, many anthropologists also engage in dialogue with other sciences (medicine, biology, computer science, mathematics, physics, etc.) and work on major contemporary issues. The latter include the environmental crisis, genetic engineering, ageing, robotics, bio-materials, pharmacopoeia, human-animal relations and so forth.

Anthropology is among the disciplines that are the most spontaneously open to shared science methodologies with many recent projects demonstrating the value of co-constructing research objects. Current thought and ideas about the forms and devices of research writing (films, documentaries, photographs, graphic novels, sound documentaries, collaborations with the performing arts, etc.) are contributing to how the results of research are returned to the population groups studied. Such advances have also enabled anthropologists to densify their expressed ideas and convey the sensitive and emotional aspects involved that are sometimes harder to put across using traditional research writing techniques.

Research centers and networks