United States

There is growing interest in anthropology to reconsider imagination, fantasy, and speculation as cultural practices, as ways to describe experiences and make sense of life. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in east Tanzania, this paper considers several expeditions of treasure hunting as modes of speculation that interrogate possible colonial pasts and industrial futures, linked to certain desires and anxieties provoked by the rise of resource nationalism in Tanzania. The paper examines the methods through which a group of people look for buried treasure left behind from the period of German colonization. It argues that treasure hunting practices in Tanzania link postcolonial memory, economic aspiration, and resource nationalism together, and are useful moments for interrogating the politics of development. The paper considers speculative treasure hunting as a “chronopolitical act” (Eshun 2003), that is, as a way through which power inequalities are explored and contested through subversions of time. This paper brings together anthropological discussions about resource extraction with methodological questions about studying speculation and imagination ethnographically.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Speculative Futures: The Practice of Treasure Hunting in Tanzania

colonialism and post colonialism

development

time

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

The past decade witnessed historic uprisings against Middle Eastern dictatorships. The violence that followed has been visually documented to an unprecedented extent. In this talk, I will draw on previous and ongoing ethnographic fieldworks with Egyptian and Syrian activists, photographers, journalists and archivists as well as NGO-workers, who have all contributed to the documentation, sharing and preservation of images of often state-sanctioned violence over the past decade in the two countries. At the time of documentation, many of these images were urgent. During the early years and months of street protests and clashes, images would be shared promptly, encouraging people to join ongoing protests and battles and demanding political responses. Protests in Egyptian and Syrian streets have largely been eradicated by a restoration of military dictatorship (in the case of Egypt) and a prolonged war with international involvement (in the case of Syria). Meanwhile the urgency of the present shifted towards temporal orientations towards the future and the past through archiving, making these images available for justice processes and collective memory-making. In this talk, I propose that examining the temporality of images, not only through their immediate or most prominent uses, but also through later re-uses, re-circulations and re-significations, will allow us to move beyond understandings of images as political, emotional or aesthetic. I thus seek to illuminate the social life of images by exploring how images engage both urgently and latently in the present, how they reach into the past and how they enable orientations towards the future.

Temporal engagements with images of violence from Egypt and Syria - on urgency, pensiveness and orientations towards the future

This paper aims to explore science journalism in the mainstream print media of Turkey. On August 17, 1999, a devastating earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 occurred in Northwestern Turkey and claimed approximately 18,000 lives. Several scientific studies and projects have concluded that another earthquake at the magnitude of at least 7 will hit Istanbul, causing at least 30 thousand deaths. However, the scientific uncertainty about the expected earthquake makes it impossible to know beforehand the location, magnitude, and time of the disaster. Since the 1999 earthquake, there is a vast and constant interest in the Turkish printed media about the anticipated disaster. This paper aims to unfold the ways in which science journalists produce knowledge about a future event that is surrounded by many uncertainties. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews with 15 journalists, the paper focuses on how the scientific knowledge produced for a not-yet-happened natural disaster is being turned into the news by the journalists.

Writing about the Expected Istanbul Earthquake: Communication of Scientific Uncertainty in Turkish Printed Media

Viral emergences follow well-worn networks of power, finding paths of least resistance•and therefore opportunities for viral spread•among communities with long histories of inequality and exploitation. Because a virus is neither living nor dead, it is an existentially social entity. A strand of nucleic acid encased within a protein envelope, a virus inserts itself into the host’s cells’ nuclei, hijacking the cells’ genetic process of reproduction to replicate itself. Because viruses opportunistically travel along paths of least resistance within individuals’ bodies and between people in larger networks, they shine a bright light on inequalities in power, in health, and in self-determination, vulnerabilities that provide opportunities for viruses to infect, adapt, and amplify. Taking these themes of viral opportunity as they connect to the political, economic, and social history of central Africa, this paper discusses the historical emergence of HIV-1M in southeastern Cameroon between 1890-1950. My analysis of the biosocial contexts of the emergence of HIV/AIDS integrates oral histories of elders from southeastern Cameroon with German and French archival materials, integrating these distinct processes of knowledge-making about the convergent historical experiences in southeastern Cameroon into a powerful analytical perspective. This paper insists on analysis of convergent social, biological, and viral factors that must have been at work, simultaneously, to enable pandemic HIV/AIDS to emerge. Understanding viral emergences in African history provides conceptual handles for critical analysis of patterns in viral emergences today and in the inevitable future.

Techniques of Affect: TechnoHealth, Pandemic Governmentality, Salon Customers and the Social Dynamic of Viral Emergence in Africa and its Diaspora

This paper presents and analyzes strategies that African salon managers and workers employ in order to ensure customer satisfaction and subsequent optimal revenue in Jamaica-Queens, NY (Nadia AHBS and Antou AHBS18) and, to a lesser extent, in Baton Rouge, LA (Princess AHBS). I argue that the ethnic branding of the service provided (“African hair braiding”) is paired with tactics of customer service that are more typical of American/western business management. I contextualize the postcolonial narrative of hybridity, heterogeneity, and pluralism (Paolini et al., 1999). First, I show how the selective performance of ethnicity is visible through the salon’s insistence on speed and timeliness. These concepts are remote from the common African interpretation of time, even in the workplace. Secondly, I examine social interactions between braiders and customers, drawing on the manner in which braiders compromise and negotiate stances of power for monetary gain and to preserve a form of collectivist organization that characterizes most sub-Saharan societies. Finally, I investigate the reasons for abandoning the traditional African braiding technique in favor of the African American one. I address the managers’ and workers’ perception of the African traditional methods of braiding and conducting business. This paper examines the performance of ethnicity (or lack thereof) as it is commodified and profitized by salon owners, and consumed by salon customers. In concurrence with Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), I argue that the manifestation of ethnic consciousness is extremely selective, as the performance of Africanness is only occasionally profitable in the presence of African American customers.

Our Daily Braids: Africanness and Ambivalence in Bradings Salon Customer Service

The outbreak and the consequent responses to the novel coronavirus have, among other things, exposed persistent surreptitious acts and arts of governmental injustices against ethnic/racial minorities. As the COVID-19 surges, governments across the world adopted and deployed international and country-specific health protocol and policy directives to effectively fight the pandemic. These acts and arts of governments, however, brought into the limelight the plight of marginalized ethnic/racial minorities whose existence the dominant society considers a threat to the advancement of their national agenda, and are, therefore, treated as an epidemic. On the one hand, governmental intensification of surveillance of these objectified social entities under the pretense of combatting the COVID-19 pandemic could no longer go unnoticed. On the other hand, the ethnic/racial minorities must contend multiple vulnerabilities of victimization and governmental monitoring, ethnic/racial profiling, and brutalities coupled with the threats and debilitating effects of the pandemic. Using data gathered through observation, the electronic and print media including some social media outlets, this paper employs the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and surveillance to analyzes nationalist’s deployment of governmental machinery against the Ewe ethnic minority in Ghana at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that while scholarly and non-scholarly attention is largely focused on the identity politics of racism at the global level, ethnically based identity politics and related atrocities at the local level are much alive and do deserve our timely interventions.

Under the Emperor’s Watch: Combatting the Epidemic amidst a Pandemic-Governmentality Revisited

As pointed out by Ana Celia Zentella and other linguistic anthropologists in the current era of resurgent xenophobia, linguistic intolerance and negative comments about language are prevalent, as they now serve as “disguised ways of voicing venomous stereotypes of race and ethnicity in public” (Zentella 2010, 2016; Urciuoli 2001) and are a means to shore up what is otherwise a fragile hegemony predicated on a monoglossic language ideology within educational institutions (Nelson & Rosa 2017; Paris & Alim 2017). Yet, students’ ways of speaking connect them to their homes and communities (Wong Fillmore 1996; Garcia-Sanchez & Orellana 2019) and to denigrate children' language(s) is to denigrate who they are. This is a truth that many systems of education are unable to face and it is our responsibility to provide convincing and sociolinguistically nuanced case studies to persuade and assist educators, parents and children themselves to hear anew rather than fear or denigrate children’s linguistic diversity. Such models are necessary in particular to support and inspire daring educators who can and do sustain and leverage children’s expertise as a legitimate and generative means to expand linguistic repertoires and associated forms of knowledge production. The papers in this panel approach this issue from a variety of linguistic anthropological perspectives and across a variety of school settings and contexts of language contact. We consider early childhood, as this is a time of great openness and promise, when children can learn best and benefit most from exposure to different languages, and when parents have great influence before there has been too much institutional influence from the majority culture. Across the papers we see strategies of success that leverage and celebrate the linguistic diversity of young children at the same time that we use linguistic anthropological tools to unearth hidden negative ideologies towards the race and languages of the children. Understanding these strategies and ideologies may contribute to linguistic anthropological research and assist parents and educators in providing more culturally sustaining practices for young children. Garcia-Sanchez, I. & Orellana, M.F. (2019). Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and Schools: Bridging learning for students from non-dominant groups New York: Routledge. Paris, D. & Alim, H. Samy (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World (Language and Literacy Series). NY: Teachers College. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621-647. Wong Fillmore, L. (1996). What happens when languages are lost? An essay on language assimilation and cultural identity. In D. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis, and J. Guo (eds.), Social Interaction, Social Context and Language: Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp, pp. 435-446. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Urciuoli, B. (2001). The complex diversity of language in the U.S. In Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader, eds. Ida Susser & Thomas Carl Patterson, 190-205. MA: Blackwell.  Zentella, A. C. (2016). "Socials," "Poch@s," "Normals" y los demas: School Networks and Linguistic Capital of High School Students on the Tijuana/San Diego Border.

Supporting Multilingual Education in Early Childhood: Linguistic Anthropological Approaches

Como se dice X en Mixteco?: Indigenous Mixtec Community Teachers Mobilizing Epistemic Ecologies in a Mixteco Heritage Language Maintenance Preschool Program

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Temporal engagements with images of violence from Egypt and Syria - on urgency, pensiveness and orientations towards the future

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Keeping Seeds: Vegetal politics, fugitive materialisms, and the political ecologies of difference

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