Forum: ‘Utopian Confluences’

Many thanks to Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for their response to my critique (Bråten 2022a) of their special section on ‘Utopian Confluences’ (especially, Blanes and Bertelsen 2021; Bertelsen 2021), and to Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale for publishing the exchange. The theoretical questions that arise from our diverging stances are, hopefully, of general interest. While I take Blanes and Bertelsen (hereafter B&B) to argue an epistemologically all-inclusive irrealism, I favour an ontologically discerning realism. It is tempting to pursue the many theoretical entailments of this contrast further, but let me in this final reply comment on the character of the exchange itself: the kind of intellectual discourse that our diverging positions seem to foster. I believe B&B's response is illustrative of a ‘post-critical’ approach that recasts principles of scholarly debate in problematic ways. Addressing this issue allows me also to clarify a perplexity in their response: How could I possibly read their contributions as ‘irrealist’ and instances of a ‘migration out of academia’?