The Old Anthropology Library (and its website) serves as a key space for intellectual debate, a place to showcase diverse departmental research in the critical tradition for which we are best known, and a setting for friendly and inclusive sociability.
Anthropologists at LSE have long been thinking about issues of decolonisation, colonial encounters, race, indigeneity and the politics of fieldwork, as well as deconstructing them and viewing them critically. These debates are intrinsic to anthropology. Rather than sweeping these awkward aspects and complexities aside, we acknowledge that our discipline, perhaps more than many, has been implicated in the colonial process; and also that, as we teach, we are simultaneously embroiled in structures of power that have colonial roots.
