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This paper is a reflection on ethnographic research I conducted on queer kinship and relationalities in South Africa between 2015 and 2016. I consider the place where anthropological studies of same-sex lives and ties meet the speculations of feminist science fiction to elaborate on a concept of queer life-shaping. Queer life-shaping articulates how my interlocutors created and negotiated natal and chosen kin constellations out of desire, love, and responsibility, and as an extension of who they are. As such, life-shaping draws on the radical yet everyday labor that is Black queer world-making, narrowing in on shifting webs of family that are guided by the loving and intentional work of lesbian parents, motherly lovers, young star-crossed couples, and dutiful descendants of ancestors that I witnessed and wrote about as part of my broader research on knowledge about female-bodied same-sexualities in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. The paper compares and contrasts ethnographic excerpts of queer life-shaping with the imaginative queer reproduction techniques described in the feminist sci-fi novels that followed me through fieldwork. I argue that interlocutors’ narratives of queer life-shaping and the reproductive possibilities found in these speculative fictions allow for a rethinking of the line between anthropology and art, and of globalized struggles for same-sex rights in the contemporary.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Speculative fictions, same-sex families, and Black queer life-shaping in South Africa

kinship and families

women

queer

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

Anticipation is ubiquitous, and yet anticipation itself tends to be an under-theorized and rarely thematized aspect of social life (Stephan and Flaherty 2019). This is nowhere truer than with respect to the intersubjective, interpersonal, and interactive aspects of anticipation. Far from being an invariant structure of subjectivity, anticipation takes on markedly different forms depending upon the interpersonal relations within which it unfolds. Positioning anticipation as a culturally and contextually variable means of relating to and affecting others, these papers each think through how anticipation is social and intersubjective in one or more of three forms: instances in which the anticipatory object is another person's (or people's) acts and experiences; cases where anticipation is a joint activity; and relationships in which one or more persons are making an effort to anticipate on behalf of others. Each of the panelists focuses on a particular ethnographic scene of anticipatory effort, engaging with the specific social understandings of or collaborations with particular others at play in the anticipatory processes involved -- including ethical and emotional labor in interaction, imaginative perspective-taking, care for others through planning and preparedness, and efforts to create systems and institutions that will withstand present threats and provide for future needs. The goal of this panel is to think through how anticipating others becomes focal through these contexts to engage with the questions, What forms of interface between people are allowing or hampering efforts to anticipate with? What mechanisms (directly embodied or distributed within the social and material field) undergird efforts after social anticipation? How are different social relationships and roles implicated in or instilled through anticipatory activities? Responding directly to this year's AAA theme of "truth and responsibility" this panel aims to consider the foundational role of anticipation in relations with others. Among other points of consideration, anticipation is essential to many forms of responsibility to (and for) others. Likewise, acting on another's behalf may require fidelity to their present and future interests. And yet again, anticipation undergirds all projects to affect others (Schutz 1967 [1932]) -- and thus prefigures any efforts to make something true for another. Truth itself, in William James' (1995 [1907]) influential formulation, had the function of "leading" to (further) future understanding -- an observation that underscores the difficulties social anticipation may face when individuals or groups appear not to share a social reality or common aims. Together the papers will aim to catalyze an ambitious conversation within anthropology on the social aspects of anticipation. Works Cited: James, W. (1995 [1907]) Pragmatism. Dover. Schutz, A. (1967 [1932]) The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press. Stephan, C. and D. Flaherty (2019) "Experiencing Anticipation: Anthropological Perspectives". Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.

Anticipating Others, Anticipating for Others, Anticipating with Others

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Anticipating Usable Assistants: An Ethnography of UX Researchers

Desensitized Surveillance: School Shooting Preparedness and the Social Register of Anticipation

One hundred years from now': Thinking Through Impermanence at a Japanese Zen Buddhist Temple in Hawai'i

Contemporary concerns about truth and responsibility seem to index an instability in the cultural production of reality itself. Intersecting technopolitical and biosocial upheavals are disrupting the conditions under which the real is constituted. Across various domains, the procedures underpinning the real and the claims it warrants are being both exposed and remade: from the rise of inflationary media (Castillo and Egginton 2016) and the virtual in technology and biomedicine (Boellstorff 2008; Whitehead and Wesch 2012) to the nonhuman ontologies of scientific practice (Barad 2007) and indigenous multinatural perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 2015; cf. Todd 2016). At a time when the ways of producing the 'reality effect’ in social life are changing, the panel seeks to explore the shifting parameters of the real through the lens of ethnography. It also aims to examine how our discipline, with its moorings in the concrete, practical and experience-near, itself engages and evokes the notion of ‘what is.' Reality is a longstanding key concern for ethnography, in terms of both its objects and method, its narrative styles and the very stakes of the anthropological encounter. It is also, and increasingly, a troubled and troubling term. We contend that the real has a history of its own. A history, on the one hand, of the specific modes of its social production and the slippages of reality’s grip at moments of crises or around edges of epistemes; on the other hand, a history of the ways reality has been approached and rendered in anthropology, including in phenomenology, thick description, constructivism, or experimental methods of research and writing that affirm or challenge ethnography’s own ‘realism’: the authority that comes with having ‘been there’ in that real that ethnographic description purports to immerse the reader in, yet cannot fully capture (Jackson 2005; Stewart 2007, cf. Barthes 1986). Today reality appears at once more malleable and exerting an ever firmer hold. As with austerity imposed by economic realities with a simultaneous liberalization of finance (Guyer and Neiburg 2019), the workings of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), or the social phenomenon of gaslighting (Sweet 2019), reality is elusive yet unrelenting. So, too, is the ‘new reality’ emerging before us with the covid-19 pandemic and the forms of its mitigation. The panel suggests that the production of reality, in social life as in writing, is intrinsically bound up with relations of power and the specific structurings of the worlds we inhabit, study, and seek to build (van de Port 2011; cf. Yurchak 2006). As such, reality is precisely a matter of not only truth and responsibility but also of the imagination. Panelists contemplate and address this dimension as central to what the ‘really real’ may mean in life as in ethnographic practice.

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Speculative fictions, same-sex families, and Black queer life-shaping in South Africa

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