Decentering (Western) Europe: Rethinking Global Entanglements from the Eastern Semi-Periphery

The timely volume proposes a new theoretical framework for ethnographic Europeanization research informed by postcolonial theory, from the vantage point of German anthropology. The reviewer argues that this innovative program of 'decentering Europe' can and should be productively extended to ethnographic research in the ECE region, in dialogue with critical ECE social sciences perspectives. 1 Following Dipesh Chakrabarty's call to provincialize Europe (Chakrabarty, 2000), the anthology edited by a team of scholars currently or formerly affiliated to the Institute for European Ethnology of Humboldt University, Berlin, proposes 'a fresh view on the fragile presence of the European project in time of multiple crises, from the perspective of its currently less considered global entanglements and dependencies, linking (German) social and cultural scientific Europeanization research with postcolonial perspectives for the first time' (cover text).