The European Certificate: an introduction

Context and origins of the European Certificate

The program is anchored in a shared interest in the rapid transformations experienced by contemporary societies and an insistence on ethnographic research in seeking to understand complex social and political processes in 'the South'. Complex social changes characteristic of countries in 'the South' include a rapid urbanisation and new relations between the urban and the rural, the opening up of international audio-visual information flows, the elaboration of new norms of governance and of new forms of governmentality brought about by administrative decentralisation, the democratisation of political life and the privatisation of the economy, the increasing complexity of local religious alternatives and the continued intervention of development actions in all domains (from health and education programs to agriculture and mining).

These transformations engender and accompany unprecedented identity reconstructions (trans-national citizenship, autochthony and ethnicities), profound mutations of social relations and forms of solidarity (relations of kinship and gender), access to an income and consumption as a generalised mode of social classification etc. Furthermore, they go hand in hand with a set of behaviours (multiple logics of existential securitisation and limited and prudent rationality on the one hand but also normative conflicts, wasting of land reserves, the informal privatisation of public goods, corruption and violence on the other hand) which can be analysed as dysfunctions, as local forms of adaptation to globalisation or as attempts to subvert existing socio-economic orders.

Finally, they are part of the complex articulations between localised practices and discourses, and increasingly homogenous and 'globalised' public policies (aid conditionality, the reform of public administrations). The diverse fields affected by these mutations are autonomous, but they are not independent. In fact, we are faced with complex configurations which bring together a set of interconnections and transfers of meaning. Political institutions and civil society use the religious and vice versa, the field of health is revelatory of political inequalities but pain an illness is taken care of by magico-religious as well as by biomedical spheres, clientelism has a tendency to compete with other principles of social organisation, corruption is present in most sectors of the administration and the 'rurban' (rurbain) connects complementary economic spaces etc.

This is why it is indispensable to place these new social configurations in their specific fields (health, religion, rural, urban, politics...) but at the same time also taking the transversal and comparative dimensions of human development (access to health, education, settlement and sanitation) and social development (access to citizenship, social services, political expression and liberty of thinking and of expression, etc.) into account.

To understand with thoroughness the complexity of the social dynamics and politics evoked above, it is necessary to envision university programmes which break with traditional logics of disciplinary specialisation and a focus on a particular geographical area as well with 'professional programmes' which aim to train development 'experts' with hypothetical key skills in hand.

The European Certificate on the Anthropology of social dynamics and development relies on an existing European scientific network. It aims at examining those complex processes in the context of a course offer proposed by different universities involving the mobility of professors and students. In a ten-year period, the network of European researchers at the origin of the certificate has grown out of the scholarly association APAD (Euro-African Association for the Anthropology of Social Change and Development). This partnership first started with a European doctoral seminar in the frame of the summer schools held every two years since 1997. These connections were reinforced through a series of bilateral Erasmus agreements. The creation of the certificate constitutes a major culmination of this partnership, but the final stage for an improved integration remains to be done, namely the creation of many Joint European Masters, in the wake of the one signed between Université de Bordeaux and Université libre de Bruxelles in June 2014. The partnership may evolve in the future and remains open to new partners.

Beyond the diversity of the themes that the researchers of the network are exploring, this partnership is characterised by a series of common methodological and theoretical stances:

• A core empiricism and an insistence on the command of the local linguistic and semiotic codes.
   
• The refusal to confine oneself to the obsolete dichotomy between fundamental and applied research, and the choice of a reflective stance on the various forms of commitment. We strongly believe that any production of knowledge in the field of social sciences impacts life in society ; those implications need to be explained and, so far as possible, understood. Hence our interest for contemporary objects which, when they become social and political stakes, need to be explored with the rigour and the precision required by fundamental research. It is about revisiting with a new glance the objects which are generally apprehended « from above » by economists and political specialists in a macrosociological and macropolitical dimension.
   
• An interactionist type of ethnography which focuses on the intricacy of social logics, which constantly resorts to scale variations to observe the phenomena under study in a comprehensive project of transversal phenomena, between the local and the global.
   
• The choice of a diachronic point of view, with history at the forefront, and with a strong interest for dynamics and processes and for the study of contemporary transformations affecting societies.

The added value of the European certificate

• International mobility: an intellectual and cultural benefit thanks to the transnational recruitment of Master students and to programmes developed by several universities in different countries. This programme proposes crossed scientific and didactic approaches, a bilingual or trilingual training on research leading to a high-level professionalisation. Besides, it adequately responds to the new stakes of the European area of higher education in terms of attractiveness and diversification, contributing as a result to reenforcing the position of university partners on the European scene.
   
• Pedagogy: the integration, crossing and combination of the scientific and pedagogical assets of several higher education institutions in a common course offer confer its specificity and novelty to the project.
   
• Research: a well-tried collaboration based on the network of anthropologists / researchers / professors who compose a scholarly society of several hundred members : the Association for the anthropology of social change and development – in French « l’Association pour l’anthropologie du changement social et du développement » or APAD. As already mentioned, the network’s members share a common stance that we could define as an interest for the fast transformations of contemporary societies, a reflective and rigorously empirical approach focused on field research and the willingness to have a dialogue with the stakeholders committed in the field of development.