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Meeting description
« (…) the array of methods, observations and analyses available through anthropology can help
us to explain the complexity of a contemporary world which witnesses contradictory movements
of the explosion of diversity and the end of boundaries » Augé & Colleyn
This is how one of the latest books which synthesizes the role of anthropology (The Work of the
Anthropologist (2006, Berg Publishers) justifies the importance of anthropology in our
contemporary worlds. Could the argument of the French anthropologists Marc Augé and Jean-
Paul Colleyn explain why anthropology and its methods have been introduced (sometimes
frenziedly) in language learning and teaching, especially since the arrival of the much lauded
concept of interculturality in its didactics, which ‘preaches’ the acceptance and respect of
diversity, but struggles to connect discourse and acts?
Worldwide scientific literature in didactics but also applied linguistics provides many examples
of the introduction of anthropology in teaching/learning programmes:
- Anthropology of the distant other (Jane Jackson in Hong Kong);
- Anthropology of the near (Albane Cain & Geneviève Zarate, 1996 ; Judith Humery &
Fred Dervin in Finland, method based on the study of non-places);
- Anthropology of mobilities and intercultural encounters (Celia Roberts, Michael
Byram, Ano Barro, Shirley Jordan et Brain Street 2000; Mike Berry 2008);
- Cyberanthropology (internet, asynchronous fora, videoconference, Second Life...
O’Dowd, 2007) ;
- Auto-ethnography (use of personal diaries, Marie-José Barbot 2006);
- Anthropology done by teaching staff and researchers in the classroom (Anna
Triantaphyllou 2002);
- Problem-based anthropologies such as the one theorized by Martine Abdallah-
Pretceille which moves away from a descriptive ethnology (2003: 17).
The purpose of this bilingual conference is to examine the miscellaneous ways of using such a
complex discipline as anthropology and its methods in language learning and teaching and to
gather some of the leading specialists interested in these methods. The conference has its roots in
a cooperative project on cyberanthropology between the Universities of Paris 8 and Turku,
Finland (ACoNte, MSH Paris Nord) and in dramatic developments in the use of anthropology
witnessed in language learning and teaching in the past few years.
Scientific committee:
Martine Abdallah-Pretceille, Université de Paris 3 & 8, France
Marie-José Barbot, Université de Lille 3, France
Michael Byram, University of Durham, Great-Britain
Fred Dervin, Département d’études françaises, Université de Turku, Finlande
Béatrice Fracchiolla, Université de Paris 8, France
Gilberte Furstenberg, MIT, USA
Esmeralda Lopes Rosa, Department of English, University of the Algarve, Portugal