United States

This Roundtable discussion engages current and past scholarship on multispecies entanglements and environmental policies in the Anthropocene, with a focus on the United States, Canada, Mexico and indigenous perspectives. We de-center the human and contribute to decolonizing the field by incorporating indigenous, feminist, and cross-border perspectives on personhood, power, and agency. Topics include the agency of plants; the importance of in-human (inorganic) and non-human (organic) entities to anthropology; animal/plant/human/microbe entanglements; food sovereignty; resource extraction and commercialization; environmental ethics; and implications for environmental policymakers.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Bats, Fish, Wild Rice, Microbes, and Petroglyphs: A Conversation about Multispecies Anthropologies and Environmental Policies

environmental policy

multispecies

indigenous knowledge

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

Joel Robbins' much anticipated second monograph promises to secure the foundation of theologically engaged anthropology. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics? Joel Robbins argues that they can. To make this point, he draws on key theological discussions of such matters as atonement, eschatology, interruption, passivity, and judgement to rethink important anthropological debates about such topics as ethical life, radical change, the ways people live in time, agency, gift giving, and the nature of humanity. The result is both a reconsideration of important aspects of anthropological theory through theological categories and a series of careful readings of influential theologians such as Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel, and Dalferth from the vantage point of rich ethnographic materials concerning the lives of Christians from around the world. In conclusion, Robbins draws on contemporary discussions of secularism to interrogate the secular foundations of anthropology and suggests that the differences between anthropology and theology in regard to this topic can provide a foundation rather than obstacle to their dialogue. Written as a work of interdisciplinary anthropological theorizing, Robbins' book also provides theologians an introduction to some of the most important ground covered by burgeoning field of the anthropology of Christianity while guiding anthropologists into some major areas of theological discussion. This roundtable invites anthropologists to join Robbins in discussing the work, as well as the implications of its argument for the discipline.

Author meets Critics: Anthropologists Respond to Joel Robbins' Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life.

The Association of Queer Anthropology (AQA) celebrates its 2020/2021 Distinguished Achievement Award Winners, in recognition of their considerable career accomplishments and lasting impact on the field of queer anthropology. Evelyn Blackwood's notable works have contributed significantly to the study of gender, kinship and sexuality in Indonesia as well as the cultural history of lesbian and gay communities in the United States. Her early ethnographic research focused on how Sumatran matrilineal communities adapted to socioeconomic and political change and offered important critiques on the persistence of patriarchy within matrilineal systems. Through well-received edited volumes, Blackwood also challenged the invisibility of female desires and sexuality in queer anthropology and theorization more broadly. Her work on Tombois and their girlfriends in Indonesia marked an early foray into transgender studies in Asia. Over her career, Gayle Rubin has merged activism with keen anthropological scholarship. Her landmark essays "The Traffic in Women" and "Thinking Sex” are still read as foundational texts in anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and social theory. Through these works, Rubin pioneered much of the analytic vocabulary around gender and sexuality that has sustained feminist and queer anthropology. Rubin has been the key ethnographer, archivist, and public historian of the San Francisco leather community, and has founded or served on the boards of several important U.S. LGBT cultural institutions. Her historical and contemporary study of erotophobia within American rightwing cultures continues to provide critical insights as to how sexual control operates in society.

Association for Queer Anthropology Distinguished Achievement Award: Evelyn Blackwood and Gayle Rubin

This two-part panel examines complex and contingent forms of political efficacy enacted by marginalized groups and individuals and investigates the theoretical frameworks within which such activities may be effectively analyzed. What we might call articulations of authority, autonomy, or sovereignty can take many forms, from behaviors James Scott once called “weapons of the weak” to the “spirit of resistance” that Jean Comaroff found on the margins of the South African state. Anthropology’s preoccupation with resistance began in the 1970s as an interdependent foil to its keen interest in power and domination, which arose alongside the global consolidation of neoliberalism as a policy and ideology of accumulation for the few through dispossession of the many. Anthropologists were in good company at this moment, as the influence of Foucault, Marxist frameworks, and postcolonial theory grew across the social sciences in the shadow of neoliberalism, bringing new, dark social realities into focus. Feminist scholars in particular examined gendered negotiations of power as a factor of public and private spheres, divisions of labor and complex cultural histories (for example, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). A proliferation of compelling ethnographic accounts of counter-hegemonic practices and the dawn of activist anthropology lightened the burden of what Sherry Ortner (2016) would later label the “dark” turn, as anthropologists focused increasingly on questions of inequity, injustice and neo-colonial subjugation. By the 1990s, backlash grew against overuse of “resistance”; Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod among others pointed to the historical contingency of the desire for individual freedom that popular and scholarly discourses of the global north might misguidedly universalize. Nonetheless, anthropology’s interest in oppositional articulations of power endures, whether labeled ethnographic refusal, abolitionist anthropology, or the horizon of radical humanism (Simpson 2014; Jobson 2019; Shange 2020). Here we unite diverse perspectives to consider the tactics employed by structurally subjugated persons to (re)orient themselves within and/or against broader, hegemonic political and economic institutions. We also, however, question the liberal notion of the universal, coherent, and stable human subject. Our goal is to highlight the complex ways persons and groups who are subordinated in some contexts exert authority and negotiate circumstances in others. With papers from around the world on topics ranging from art, laughter and healing to resettlement, caste inequity, rural marginalization and reproductive rights and technologies, we interrogate the way anthropologists depict “resistance” with unfavorable odds by thinking beyond individual subjectivity and linear temporality, bringing multiple accretions of power and intersecting affective circulations into the conversation.

Anthropology Beyond Resistance, Part 2

My research focuses on the perception of political action and sovereignty of Israeli-Jews, who, following their dissent over Israel's control over Palestine, have exiled themselves from Israel and moved abroad or to Palestinian localities in the West-Bank. One of my main research questions was to understand the way these Israelis narrate their withdrawal from the State of Israel in light of their political involvement before their departure. I have chosen the term "withdrawal" in order to highlight a lacuna in the anthropological literature in which there seems to be no clear distinction between the terms resistance and dissent, asking, whether withdrawal from the state or self-exile is an act of resistance or dissent? This talk will focus on these questions. Following Tobias Kelly's suggestion (2019) to think through dissent while focusing on its particular history, forms of agency, personhood, and change, and Laura Ahearn's (2001) call to distinguish between different kinds of agency- I will introduce a new type of agency- agency of abandonment. By proposing this type of agency, I will differentiate between dissent and resistance, defining dissent as describing actions and emotions of alienation, estrangement, and reluctance from state policy or ideology. Dissent does not necessarily result in classical political action in the form of collective actions and claims for societal change, it can be expressed through individual evasive actions. This perspective can help us uncover and understand the type of agency, the line of thought, the state of mind, the affects and the actions, associated with dissent.

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Author meets Critics: Anthropologists Respond to Joel Robbins' Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life.

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