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As envisaged by Robert A. LeVine many years ago, the human development indicators have improved in many societies as income, healthcare and educational opportunities have been enlarged. Global transformations have led to significant decline in extreme poverty and an increase in working class and middle class families around the world in the emerging economies throughout Africa and Asia. As the technological and global influences continue to challenge the dominant narrative in academic psychology, conflated with WEIRD data assumptions, interdisciplinary research will continue to increase in value and scope, where LeVine’s classical approach in psychological anthropology, combined with psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, demography, language or area research and population studies, offers a path forward. The essays collected here in addition to honoring LeVine’s work, hold out the promise of a real convergence between psychology and anthropology or the development of a psychosocial science -- a confluence between positivism and relativism, empiricism and ethnography, and social sciences and human sciences. The scientific search for universal laws and the ever expanding search for cultural meanings in the diverse communities around the world must continue simultaneously and in conjunction with the transnational or global challenges we face today. In this panel, we will discuss LeVine’s vision of an emerging and interdisciplinary psychosocial science.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

The Cultural Psyche: The Selected Papers of Robert A. LeVine on Psychosocial Science

psychological anthropology

psychiatry

culture

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 spring of 2019 the 2018 University of North Texas Master’s Cohort decided to replicate the AAA/CoPAPIA 2009 Anthropology MA Career survey in order to understand how career paths, reflections on education, and views on professional organizations of anthropology master’s graduates had changed over the past decade. The survey team collected a non-random sample of 850 valid survey responses from the primary respondent group: those holding a master’s degree in anthropology who received this degree in 2018 or earlier from a North American institution. In this roundtable, members of the Survey Team, Advisory Board, and AAA/CoPAPIA team will discuss the methods and outcomes of this discipline-wide survey.

The 2019 American Anthropology Masters Career Survey: A Discussion on Methods and Outcomes

Religion and trauma have a fraught relationship: for some, religious communities and ideologies can be a source of great violence, while for others, they can be a salve on a wound. What role does religion specifically play in the experience of gender-based violence? Some religious communities can be alienating and damaging to survivors, such as survivors of Intimate Partner Violence who are expected to stay with their abusive spouse. Alternatively, religious practices and congregations can also be a source of strength, community, and personal healing. In this debate, scholars of gender-based violence will discuss the multifaceted role of religion in their respective fieldwork sites, and debate about the many sides to this fraught•yet potentially fruitful•relationship. We will consider how scholars and practitioners alike can be attentive to the different truths of survivors and their intersectional experiences with religion and violence, and be responsible and accountable to those truths. Through this conversation, we will explore a variety of questions, including: What can be learned from these different experiences in the field of gender-based violence to support religious survivors? What can be learned to support survivors who may have been further victimized by their religious practices or communities? Moreover, how can ethnography on gender-based violence and religion encourage productive collaboration between practitioners and clergy? Through these types of questions, we can move towards an anthropological praxis that supports survivors of gender-based violence with respect to religion across a variety of contexts.

Spiritual Divides: Debating the Role of Religion in Gender-Based Violence

The call to reimagine truth and responsibility brings with it pertinent questions about the writings we produce, the concepts we mobilize, and the narratives we circulate. The writing culture moment (Clifford and Marcus 1986) offered new meanings to what it means to write an ethnography and for whom, and what it means to be reflexive. ‘Writing Culture’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986) provided much-needed avenues to challenge particular notions of authority and representation. In doing so, it specifically emphasized how anthropological truths, among other things, are partial, contested, and incomplete. Thirty-four years since then• several turns and approaches in between• we are still grappling with ways in which our writings and analyses construct, sustain, and mediate specific partial truths with overbearing authority• particularly about communities that experience marginalization and vulnerabilities. Building and expanding the literature on strategic essentialism (Spivak 1984), ontological openings (de la Cadena 2015), decoloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, Quijano 1999), post-colonialism (Mbembe 2001), post-development, (Escobar 1995, 2000), we aim to continue discussing how ‘ethnographic concepts’ (de la Cadena 2015) are essential to widen, and trouble assumed meanings. While we acknowledge the deeply situated partial truths and ethnographic concepts we produce, we often reify and mobilize these truths, concepts, and social categories in our efforts to build and extend our own research. It is this inherent contradiction that this panel wishes to address. We look at the practices that produce these ‘truths’ and tease out the intricate relations of power/knowledge that manifest through these practices. Specifically, we complicate understandings of ‘human rights’, ‘development’, and ‘indigeneity’, which are often an integral part of our analyses and are considered as truths. We seek to present the very contested, situated, non-permanent, and deeply partial natures of these truths. We do so based on our ethnographic challenges, where we try to grasp the multiple meanings of specific enacted concepts such as ‘dispossession’, ‘indigenous peoples’, ‘development’, and ‘victimhood’. We will draw attention to how these ‘assumed’ meanings, which become ‘truths’ and ‘social categories’, are mobilized even in our ‘act of doing’ ethnography and how they are reaffirmed and reified in our quest to produce authoritative narratives. Therefore, we will necessarily address the need for ethnographies to not reproduce the ‘danger of a single story’ (Adichie 2009) but be diverse and contested. This panel, therefore, asks: How do our ethnographic experiences give meanings to concepts, which will eventually become analytical categories? How can we avoid reinforcing and reifying the very partiality that we seek to critique? How do they, then, inform the narratives we produce? How could we be more sensitive in producing ethnographic narratives? How do we navigate and contest regimes of truth and power that are often established and protected by the discipline? How are ‘non-academic’ truths to be acknowledged?

Situating Interconnected Truths in Ethnographies: Knowledges and Practices

Meanings, Narratives and Truths: (Un)expected Relational Meanings About Indigeneities

Normative Implications of Development Driven Truths: Conflicting Value Systems in Kyrgyzstan

Sumak Kawsay Buen Vivir as an Alternative?

Tragic yet laughable: Loop of Representation in Palestinian art.

Communities characterized by hierarchical and dependent relations are cast as inherently oppressive within dominant emancipatory liberal frameworks that privilege notions of freedom and independence. As international humanitarian and development institutions aim to redistribute wealth on a global scale, they are often at pains to emphasize that it is not a “gift” that could create dependency, antithetical as it is to the idealized figure of the unfettered, self-determining individual as the proper subject of liberal ethical life. Such logics, however, exist in tension in places where patronage and dependency are valued as the necessary means of wealth redistribution, guided by collective moral and ethical obligations that often reinforce hierarchical interdependence between subjects aspiring to forms of ethical life. Through ethnographic examples from Africa and the Middle East, this panel examines lived relations of patronage and dependency within Muslim-majority communities and the religious idioms and ethics within which they are articulated. Drawing upon and expanding recent scholarly debates on Islamic development, charity, and distributive relations, the panel aims to offer a fresh investigation of the classic anthropological question about how and why certain ethical communities may work to sustain, rather than eliminate, social hierarchies. The first paper contrasts conflicting notions of “sustainability” within the work of two Islamic development organizations in Tanzania: one beholden to the narrow temporality of global development funding cycles, where “sustainability” entails short-term inputs designed to inhibit dependency, and another supported by pious charitable donations where “sustainability” means long-term relations of wealth redistribution and care. In turn, the second paper examines how shifting moral claims concerning Islamic almsgiving shape hierarchical patronage relations between Syrian refugees and shaweesh (refugee camp headmen) in Lebanon, marked by a tension between the imperative of economic accumulation, on one hand, and a pious obligation toward wealth redistribution, on the other. The third paper examines the social and material relations that guide Sudanese migrants' "sanduk" (mutual aid) societies in Beirut, including how generational and gendered forms of hierarchy are reproduced through and structure conditions of migrant communal survival, and how ethical life factors into these relations of communal co-dependence, both as a mutual aspiration and as a marker of difference/exclusion. The fourth paper analyzes the voluntary submission of agricultural labor within Senegalese daara residential communities, framed as it is within both a Sufi devotional idiom embedded in hierarchical shaykh-disciple relationships as well as liberalized notions of the economy invoked alongside the receipt of international development funds. The fifth paper examines the network of moral interdependencies constituting agricultural day-labor in Syria before the 2011 war, and how Syria's market liberalization reconfigured these networks, producing new tensions and contradictions between domestic economies of care and previous forms of cooperation.

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