United States

This year the United Nations celebrates the anniversary of the critical Fourth World Conference on Women, which helped to set the agenda for promotion of women’s human rights over the subsequent 25 years. The 64th meetings of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW, mostly cancelled due to Covid-19) were to connect the Beijing Platform for Action with other UN agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Sustainable Development Goals, in order to produce a new, effective, and legally binding declaration for discussion at the September 2020 UN General Assembly meeting. The International Women’s Anthropology Conference (IWAC) organized a panel discussion at CSW64 with five speakers offering anthropological insights on relevant issues such as women’s leadership potential, women’s role in environmental action, marginalized people defending their lands, and violence against women. The CSW64 panel is the basis for the proposed roundtable. This roundtable is in accord with the AAA 2020 theme, “Truth and Responsibility,” as we join the effort to introduce anthropological insights into the international discussion of women’s rights with full awareness of our responsibilities to our grassroots collaborators, and of their own senses of responsibility to each other, their cities, and their nations.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Grassroots Truths and Responsibilities: Anthropological Perspectives on Activism and Human Rights

action anthropology

feminist anthropology

human rights

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

panel

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab, Mrs. A, met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. The case of Mrs. A appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in 20th century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. Mrs. A’s sessions with Dev Satya Nand included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. "The Doctor and Mrs. A" is a meditation on these worlds, dwelling in composite time frames drawn from archival and historical research, classics, and myth, as interacting forms or "moving structures." As Pinto analyzes the dynamic between Satya Nand and Mrs. A, she weaves temporalities of past experience with present reverie and future projection, frames not only for women's personal horizons, but for the broader possibilities of Indian psychoanalysis, mythology, and political concepts for a nation soon to be born. Rather than uncovering latent meanings as in Western psychoanalylsis, the dynamic between Satya Nand and Mrs. A is a profoundly regenerative one, gesturing to its own method. Playing with ideas not as content but as transformations in the arrangements of forms - such as place, idea and genre, drawn from disparate sources - enables us to imagine new and evocative scenes of inquiry. Mobilizing the voices of both analyst and analysand, Pinto reveals to us the possibility of thinking with a concept of "counter-ethics." In this roundtable, we discuss how "The Doctor and Mrs. A" compels us to reconsider several anthropological themes: questions of gender, power, and possibility; ethics from the standpoint of movement and change; imaginings of epistemic and moral canons; and finally, the place of art, mythology, and sidelined histories of science and method in conceiving truth and responsibility. What does it mean to consider ethical imaginations from another time and place - of immense social struggle, intimate voices and confused desires? What does such narrative demand of us today?

Counter-Ethical Scenes and Other Arrangements in an Indian Dream Analysis
A Roundtable on "The Doctor and Mrs. A," by Sarah Pinto

As the organizing principles of this year’s annual meeting, “truth” and “responsibility” urge anthropologists to turn inward by calling into question the very practices, beliefs, assumptions, and commitments that guide our scholarly inquiries In a discipline inclined to seek its truths by turning outward•if not directly towards the Other•this introspective exercise does not come easily. It not only asks us to reckon with our place in anthropology’s violent and extractive legacies, it also demands that we expand and explode our very understanding of what constitutes anthropological relevance. What are the consequences of this preoccupation with what and who lives outside or elsewhere? What gets erased, what goes unsaid, who is pushed to the margins or out of anthropology altogether? This panel is concerned with speaking to how the tension between Self/Other collides with the everyday conditions and culture of anthropology in academic departments, at our field sites, and within the discipline’s institutions. We seek to name elisions and silences and to address the shape and toll they take in the quotidian and microscopic processes of anthropological training and knowledge-making. How does it seep into anthropology’s pedagogical paradigms, particularly as they relate to methods training and core curricula? Why aren’t we able to acknowledge•as in the case of mental illness, for example (Parikh 2019)•how anthropologists experience and navigate the very structures and phenomena we interrogate in our scholarly work? Where, and how, do the politics of expertise intersect with the perpetual racialization of Black, Indigenous, and other non-White students? This forum asserts that the project of dismantling barriers to inclusion and equity requires laying bare and coming to terms with the inconvenient and uncomfortable. Within a framework of “radical honesty” (Williams 2016), the panelists approach these questions from their own experiences as a theoretical and pedagogical starting point for envisioning an anthropology invested in decolonial, queer, anti-imperial liberation. We also take prompt from Zora Neale Hurston, as well as this year’s theme, by tacking forth between questions and answers. What remains unresolved for those of us grappling with our commitment to a discipline haunted by colonial and imperial legacies? Where too, have we found answers•perhaps from our “elsewhere (Reese 2019), from our interlocutors, or from analytical frameworks outside of the Global North academy? In foregrounding the personal and quotidian, we explore the creative and productive potential in alternate modes of articulating, witnessing, theorizing, collaborating, and holding space for our fore bearers.

The Everyday Politics and Praxis of Truth, Responsibility and Honesty in Anthropology

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno warn against aesthetic forms that produce passive political subjects malleable to authoritarian projects (1987). They locate the origins of this deceptive aesthetics to the Enlightenment. The papers on this panel find distinct genealogies in the production of different state aesthetic projects, focusing on how these distinct political projects mobilize aesthetics in different ways, offering distinct conceptions of political subjectivity and governance. Within an emergent anthropology of political aesthetics, the prominence of ideological performativity has been specifically noted in relation to the constitution of political subjects (Aptel 2005, Askew 2002, Kaur 2005, Roy 2007, Werbner et. al 2014). In diverse geographical contexts, we look at how political movements and regimes relate their political projects to specific aesthetic formations. Cults of personality are constructed around sexualized figures of personalist desire; infrastructure and architecture not only represent, but are part of the active transformation of the citizen into the revolutionary subject; the spectacles of gatherings, demonstrations, and marches are presented as performative interventions into the workings of global capitalism. In these diverse contexts, form and content are interwoven•the medium is the message. This relationship between form and content is perhaps most visible in the spirit of high modernism that pervaded Soviet architecture. The built environment was meant to reflect the authoritarian domination of nature by science and social and economic progress (Scott 1998). The high modernist project was aimed at social engineering through a physical environment that emphasized a processual movement toward the creation of the New Man. Aesthetics were part of a utopian project with the power to transform its inhabitants into a new political subject. Built space became an ideological conduit of the state. The pedagogical spirit of high modernism has much to reach out outside of the USSR and the sphere of architectural imaginaries. Populist and mass politics often rally around figures that are deified and reified as incomparable•the only true representatives of the people. The physical appearance and style of these figures come to be an intensified focal point for a political gaze hyper-attuned to the discourse, rhetoric, and dispositions employed by this beloved object of their attention. Together, we interrogate the interstices between aesthetics and ideology in distinct political and regional contexts: Through investigating the spectacular and mass actions of the AKP supporters (demonstrations, rallies, campaigns), we analyze how populist subjects see their political acts as productive of economic values and threatening messages for political enemies; reflecting on the architecture of East Germany, we contemplate how built environment imbues citizens with notions of community and collective political identity; in Guatemala, we see how naming and ideology are intertwined; in Argentina, we elucidate how cults of personality conflate political prowess with sexual desirability and feminine vulnerability. Raymond Williams expressed interest in the aesthetic manifestations of political, social, and economic processes (1977). Following in his footsteps, our turn towards examining aesthetics in the sphere of political projects furthers transdisciplinary inquiries into the relationship between emotion, affect, performance, superstructure, and ideology.

Sensing the Political: Aesthetics, Imaginaries, and Infrastructures

Facing what Remains: Holding Portraits of (Absent) Histories in Post-Genocide Guatemala.

Housing Complex 7: Social and Material Durabilities in the Former East Germany

The Semiotic Aesthetic of Populism: Neoliberalism, Authoritarianism, and Mass Mobilization in Contemporary Turkey

Widowhood and Political Performances of Vulnerability

In her path-breaking book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart, Ruth Behar encouraged anthropologists to consider questions of representation, authorship, subjectivity, emotion, and genre. Her work dovetailed with scholarship by Faye Harrison that encouraged us to seriously consider how anthropologists might decolonize a discipline that was once routinely reinscribed disparate power relations between observer and observed. In the twenty plus years since the publication of these key texts, anthropologists have pushed the boundaries of representation, rethinking how we observe and witness changing cultures and, perhaps more importantly how we participate and how we are affected by the communities in which we study. The papers in this panel explore what it means to vulnerable observers in this historical moment where anti-Latinx sentiment has reached a fever pitch. Rhetoric deployed by former President Trump launched policies and vigilantism that has further marginalized and subjugated migrant and racialized Latinx communities in the United States. As anthropologists who have been bearing witness to the violence of this moment, the papers in this panel seek new ways to both represent Latinx communities to stand alongside our interlocutors.

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Grassroots Truths and Responsibilities: Anthropological Perspectives on Activism and Human Rights

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