Genealogy, Critique, and Decolonization: Ibn Khaldun and Moving Beyond Filling the Gaps

Work talk by Sertaç Sehlikoglu (UCL)

The aim of this presentation is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and decolonizing movement. The presentation approaches to decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking, as it can go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies by engaging with non-Eurocentric scholarship and, additionally, by carrying the critical angles to the ways it engages with those non-Eurocentric scholarships. To illustrate, it uses the case of Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar of social sciences and historical analysis from 14th Century - who is often referred to as the first sociologist. On the one hand, his influence in classical Western thinking is largely dismissed. On the other hand, as a counter-response to this dismissal, the new Islamic revivalist intelligentsia in the Muslim right engage with him in a selective manner that not only rejects that central critical thinking, but, even worse, sanctions the local regimes of power, including that local canon. By locating his scholarship to multiple tropes in anthropological theory and reading his evolutionist thinking vis-à-vis the post-colonial literature in anthropology and sociology, I question the limits and possibilities of critical thinking within and beyond the decolonizing movement.

Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist and an associate professor at UCL’s Institute of Global Prosperity. Her work focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She is the recipient of a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2019), the author of “Working Our Desire: Women, Sport and Self-Making in Istanbul” (2021) and the co-editor of several journal issues including “The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender and Sexuality” (2020). She is also the editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies’ Reviews Section.