Following divisive political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016, political commentators have argued that we have entered a new global epoch: the post-truth era. Attention has focused on the ways in which changes in the way information is collected, presented and consumed have undermined confidence in authority and even in the notion of truth itself. On the day following Trump’s announcement of his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, against scientific advice, Anthropology Today has published an article on the study of post-truth by Dr Jonathan Mair. In the piece, based on years of research on cultures of belief, Dr Mair argues that the tools that social anthropologists have developed for the study of religious belief may be helpful in understanding the profound transformations in concepts of evidence and truth that characterise the post-truth era.
Dr Mair will discuss post-truth anthropology at an upcoming conference on Wilful Blindness, organised by Dr Judith Bovensiepen, the School of Anthropology and Conservation here at Kent and the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science.