United States

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Linguistic Techniques of Political Action, Solidarity, and Resistance

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.

technical paper

This paper examines the discursive acts taken by participants in the comments sections of news videos covering the Indian COVID-19 crisis in Spring 2021, in the larger context of ongoing globalization. The comments section of press coverage of the situation becomes a interactive space where both Indian citizen and commenters of other nationalities engage in acts of grief and solidarity. International participants in these spaces act to signal an affiliation with Indians living through the COVID-19 crisis, often by invoking their own loss and personal grief caused by COVID-19. However, against the backdrops of racial tension and Indian political dissatisfaction, comments also become a tool to cast blame and express outrage. In expressing their grief, many Indian participants - at home and abroad - decry the government and the state of the Indian media coverage, while international participants can fall back on stereotypical tropes about India to explain the massive spread of COVID-19. In analyzing these actions among international interactants, this paper dissects the familiar dichotomy of global and local identities, and how these identities come to bear in online interactions. By displaying empathetic grief, commenters outside of India overtly signal a global identity, sometimes in such a way that the participant specifically contrasts it with a national identity. Similarly, Indian participants signal an appreciation for the global community in accepting this solidarity. In contrast, participants can withhold support or the acceptance of support to signal a locally focused conception of identity.

Grief, outrage, solidarity: Examining the Interactions among Global and Local Commenters on Online Media Coverage of the COVID-19 Crisis in India

Recently, the world has witnessed an increase in populist leaders rising to new levels of political power, including in the contemporary Philippines. Fueled in part by market-driven analytics to maximize appeal, many current populist leaders have had great success in constructing election-winning political personae and embracing rhetorical strategies that have captured the hearts and minds of people in their respective countries. This paper presents an analysis that goes beyond rhetoric to demonstrate that some of the most important tools and techniques in building and sustaining populist appeal lie in generating affective connections through language. In this way, language can be seen as a medium through which hegemonic relations are built and sustained along many dimensions. This analysis specifically engages with codeswitching as a locally-calibrated technique employed by the current Philippine president through which affective connections are built and sustained, a practice that resonates in special ways with the linguistic experiences of speakers in the multilingual Philippine milieu. Consonant with the theme of this year’s conference, “Truth and Responsibility,” this approach engages with the possibility that linguistic analysis can be used to shed light on the tools and techniques used by populist leaders around the world, revealing the multiple ways that language can be leveraged to achieve political power and influence.

Making Legible the Linguistic Tools of Populist Regimes: Codeswitching as a Political Technique in the Contemporary Philippines

Informed by ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, including dozens of semi-structured interviews and hundreds of hours of participant observation amongst Parisians, primarily those who live and work in Montmartre, I document how people in this community construct and enact narratives during the current global health crisis, in particular the analogical and conceptual aspects of these narratives (i.e. comparisons with the AIDS epidemic). How are people constructing a mythology of COVID19 in real-time as the pandemic evolves? What does this mythology look like when talk becomes (re)action(s) and what does it say about the future? Using narrative analysis and conceptual metaphor theory, I examine how people employ metaphors (e.g. of illness, Sontag 1977), cultural scripts (e.g. of plague in Europe) and other linguistic world-building tools in their talk about their experiences and comprehensions of the virus. Following the arguments of Ochs (2012), I propose that talking about COVID19 is itself an experience of the virus, an experience that informs people’s understandings of their present circumstances and future possibilities.

Mobilizing Mythologies : COVID19 Talk and Storytelling in Paris

Elements of history and folklore have been invoked in Montenegrin Serbs’ discourses opposing the 2019 Montenegrin Law on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the Legal Status of Religious Communities. Protesters and protest-acts invoked the struggles and triumphs of Serbian heroes and other allusions to folklore or mythology. Additionally, some potentially unexpected characters made their way into protest image-texts, as Papa Smurf was also taken up as a sign in the context of the protests. These components have been incorporated into the protests, both on the ground in Montenegro and digitally over social media, by citing specific aspects of such folkloric or cartoon elements. This paper will identify some key image-texts and discourses in the context of protests against the Montenegrin Law on Freedom of Religion to consider how and why particular aspects of history, folklore, and popular culture come to be incorporated in protests. What is being cited, and what effect do these citational acts have on protest movements? How do these citational acts help communicate political, national, and religious concerns? In analyzing such image-texts, this paper will work with understandings of citationality and erasure to discuss the interconnectedness of folklore and popular culture with protests against the Montenegrin Law on Freedom of Religion. Furthermore, this paper will explore citationality as a useful framework with which to consider the interactions between popular culture and protests.

Papa Smurf and "Sviće Zora": Citing Cartoons and Folklore in Protests Against the 2019 Montenegrin Law on Freedom of Religion

Graduate students, preparing for careers in and out of anthropology, often find themselves caught between training based in the past, and present, of the discipline and a need to become a different future. This is increasingly the case when it comes to questions of decolonizing, decanonizing, and decentering. While the theme of this year’s annual meeting signals the growing interest in these movements, many within anthropology still struggle to make space for alternative pedagogy, inclusive citational practices, critical race theory, transnationalism, and Indigenous scholarship. Graduate students, in particular, do not always have the resources, communities, or flexibility to participate in moving anthropology to take responsibility for its pasts and radically redefine its possible futures. As we work to meet the demands of the departments and institutions that train us, we also struggle to learn and promote a different anthropology, a yet unfulfilled anthropology, an erased, ignored, or appropriated anthropology, an anthropology that better resembles us and/or the people we work with, an anthropology sometimes at odds with the one we are being taught. This roundtable, therefore, brings together graduate students from different departments and subfields to discuss the various trials they’ve encountered and tactics they’ve deployed in studying anthropology with an eye towards also reshaping it. Writing this abstract in the wake of so many who have graduated with anthropology degrees but chosen to leave the discipline and with the continued resonance of Audre Lorde’s declaration that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,” the question of how we become anthropologists and what it means to do so is all the more pressing. Who do we read and cite as graduate students? What can we do when we find our coursework lacking people of color, Indigenous, lgbtq, and other non cis-gendered, white scholars? How do we create collaborative communities in and beyond our departments and institutions? How do we recognize gaps in our training and in our own understandings of anthropology? And what do we do when we do recognize these? To whom are we beholden as graduate level anthropologists? For whom do we write? Teach? Learn? And how do we write, teach, and learn once we answer these questions? How do we reconcile our academic and anthropological aspirations with our belonging to and/or participation in settler-colonial and colonial states and regimes of knowledge production? While focusing on how graduate students navigate these issues--ones that we hope are of concern more broadly within the discipline and beyond--we speak both to other graduate students in similar positions and to the faculty and departments that seek to help, train, and eventually hire us.

Learning for Our Futures: Trials and Tactics for Decolonizing Graduate Training

Amid an escalating planetary breakdown, anthropologists are increasingly concerned with what Tsing calls “collaborative survival,” the cooperative, life-sustaining work that sometimes emerges across social, cultural, and biological divides during times of upheaval (2015, 29). Now home to a majority of human earthlings, cities both exceed and engender our capacity for this work. As a result, ethnographic research in urban environments increasingly requires immersion in the everyday challenges of making life liveable on a planet in crisis. Many urban anthropologists feel called not only to understand these challenges but also to participate in the work of addressing them. This roundtable on Collaborative Ecologies will interrogate the theoretical, methodological, and ethical potentials of engaged, “more-than-research” approaches to urban environmental anthropology (Theriault et al., ip). Today’s cities teem with multiple forms of life, intermingling with ever more complex infrastructural grids, transport systems, and media. These complex assemblages engender diverse coalitions of workers, feminist organizations, and Indigenous and/or racialized peoples, who find common purpose in the defense of their lives and environments (Reese, 2018). Cities have also become sites for an array of feminist, antiracist, and decolonial approaches to collaborative ethnography (Isoke, 2014). Such work, however, mostly engages the human consequences of social and political inequality, often omitting the ecological dimensions of structural violence. This roundtable will bring together critical ethnographers who are currently involved in collaborative research with environmental justice coalitions in cities around the world. Following Di Chiro’s writing on “living environmentalisms,” we define environmental justice as encompassing any activity or movement that “articulate[s] people’s concerns about their families’ and communities’ access to social reproduction” (2008, 294; see also Hoover, 2017). Roundtable participants will learn from one another about: (1) how urban environmental justice coalitions form and take creative or experimental action in defense of social reproduction; (2) how collaborative research with these coalitions informs theories of social change and urban design; and (3) what such research collaborations reveal about the capacities and shortcomings of ethnographic and related methods. By centering the work of ethnographers who actively collaborate with nonacademic practitioners, from designers to ecologists to agronomists, on matters of pollution, mobility, food access, sanitation, ecological health, and more, we aim to inspire a more responsive, cohesive, and inclusive urban environmental anthropology, one that advances knowledge of urban life while contributing to the design of more liveable cities. Di Chiro, Giovanna. "Living Environmentalisms: Coalition Politics, Social Reproduction, and Environmental Justice." Environmental Politics 17, 2 (2008): 276-98. Hoover, Elizabeth. The River Is in Us. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Isoke, Zenzele. "Can't I Be Seen? Can't I Be Heard? Black Women Queering Politics in Newark." Gender, Place & Culture 21, 3 (2014): 353-69. Reese, Ashanté M. Black Food Geographies. University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Theriault, Noah, Tim Leduc, Audra Mitchell, June M. Rubis, and Norma Jacobs Gaehowako. "Living Protocols: Remaking Worlds in the Face of Extinction." Social & Cultural Geography (in press). Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Collaborative Ecologies: Anthropologies of (and for) Survival in the More-Than-Human City

In certain communities the COVID-19 pandemic is characterized by disbelief, protest, and outright denial. This is true even as millions of people contract the coronavirus and hundreds of thousands perish from it. In the proposed paper I analyze this phenomenon as part of a culture of denial that is not limited to COVID-19 but intricately tied to other social problems. In particular, I argue skepticism around COVID-19 reinvents and even reinforces climate change denial by drawing on the same kinds of fear, logic, and paranoia that pit certain peoples and ways of knowing against others. Deep-seated distrust of leftists, scientists, and academics • fortified by political leadership that benefits from such distrust • reaches critical mass in moments such as the current pandemic and triggers defensive assertions of a status quo many are anxious to maintain no matter the cost. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Florida to examine how and why COVID-19 skepticism bleeds into climate change skepticism. As part of this I analyze the idea of the “conspiracy,” which is widespread in conservative communities but remains under-examined by anthropologists and other scholars who have a tendency to disregard such conspiracies as nonsense. I ask, what lessons can dismissive responses to COVID-19 teach us about a political climate that fosters other kinds of denial, including climate change denial? And how can scholars begin to bridge the gaps between belief and skepticism • and contempt and distrust • that hogtie collective action during an era that demands global collaboration?

Anthropologies of Rumor and Conspiracy

Conspiracy, COVID, and climate change: Toward an understanding of disbelief

In the long nineteenth century, in Surmene in Northeast Turkey, there lived a woman who was called Meyves Nine (tr. Nana Meyves). She never got sick; she never took medication. One night, in the 130th year of her life, she went to bed and never woke up again. This is an abridged version of her life and it would not be worth telling if the thirty years after her death was not also the beginning of her new life as an alien grandma. On August 3rd, 1998, the local newspaper announced that American UFO organizations were soon arriving to visit Nana Meyves’ village. Building on media resources and interviews, this paper traces truth claims about the alienness of Nana Meyves, from the edges of scientific inquiry into longevity to conspiracy theories about Israeli intervention and US meddling. I discuss how the long-lived, healthy body of Nana Meyves became a sign of the extraterrestrial characteristics of the human gesturing towards the promise of alien encounters (Doyle 2003; Battaglia 2006; Roth 2006) to expand the limits of earthly bodies (Helmreich 2012). But, what happens when these claims about an alien grandma circle back to her village? I argue that Nana Meyves’s alien body•read through her extraordinary health and longevity•is embraced regionally by pointing to the touristic potentiality of having alien kin; however, this cosmic kinship first needed to be nationalized through wrestling with conspiracy theories that claim the alienness of Nana Meyves could be used as a foreign plot against Turkish unity.

Naturalizing Alien Grandma: Longevity, Nationalism, and the Allure of Cosmic Kinship in a Turkish Black Sea Town

This paper addresses the subject of rumors and other collectively produced and shared stories that have a potential to open up a specific productive space for alternative forms of experiencing and narrating reality. When people circulate specific (highly contextualized) rumors, they mediate their personal and communal anxieties and uncertainties over occurred ambiguous situations. The residents of a rural village of Dugani in Sakha Republic, the north-eastern region of the Russian Federation • found themselves in particular contingent circumstances, which prompted rapid generation and transmission of pervasive rumors on potentiality of radioactive threat of the Direge rare metals deposit site and its damaging effects on the local environment as well as health of the village residents. This paper demonstrates how localized rumors and similar extraordinary stories exemplify the uneven power relations between the local community, the extractive company, and the state; through the production and reproduction of certain rumors, the village residents express their fears and anxieties over changing environmental conditions (pollution and radiation), concerns over health, navigating their precarious and marginalized positions within the extensive discourses on economic development, extractive profits, and government interests.

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