United States

When does knowledge of law appear and to whom? Analytical weight in the anthropology of law often falls to the moment of decision framed as an announcement or performance of the law. But legal processes produce knowledge and reshape possible lives in ways far beyond the force of decision. This panel explores the forms of emancipation, deferral, waiting, or disruption that seem to exceed moments of decision. What kinds of knowledge appear in these interstitial times and practices? What types of normativity become apparent when analytic focus on legal judgment is deferred? How do legal actors respond to the flux between differing degrees of uncertainty as possibilities for maneuver open and close? And who gives shape, substance, or tenor to legal processes in these times? This panel connects research in India, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, to address these questions through empirical studies that traverse jurisdictional boundaries. By decentering the decision, these papers open up opportunities to think about the types of knowledge that appear alongside or beyond expert knowledge.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Deferred and Delayed: Temporalities of Law

religion/spirituality

temporality

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

Belatedness and Duration in the Jurisprudence of the Syrian Revolution

Deception and Irresolution in Indian Law

Deferring Jurisdiction: Pakistani Hindu Families in the eyes of which law?

The Time of the Law Remains: Ascetic Formations of the Law in Lebanon

Unwriting Judgement: Procedural Exceptions in Kurdish Courts

This roundtable brings together bioarchaeologists and other experts whose work concerns bioarchaeology and its practices to consider the arduous task of decolonizing the field. As a start, and given the theme of the 2021 AAA annual meeting (“Truth and Responsibility”), we ask what difficult truths still need to be revealed about bioarchaeology’s past and that of its sister fields, skeletal biology and forensic anthropology. We confront the structural, community, and individual violence bioarchaeology has perpetrated over its history, and we take responsibility for these acts. We recognize the inherent merit of calls for repatriation, redress, and restitution coming from multiple and heterogeneous archaeological collectives and descendant communities. While NAGPRA startled bioarchaeologists awake to their responsibilities to living peoples, the law has had uneven results, and the reckoning that it has led to in bioarchaeology remains insufficient and incomplete. Along with our responsibilities to the past, then, we also consider what bioarchaeologists can do to actively deconstruct bioarchaeology’s colonialist legacy as part of standard disciplinary practice today and in the future. Bioarchaeology’s insulation from multiple publics must come to an end. In that spirit, we recognize patterns of past and present knowledge production in bioarchaeology that have marginalized and excluded descendant communities and scholars of color. We also discuss pedagogical practices that promote equity, diversity, and inclusion, as well as modes of professional training and practice that destabilize the primacy of the academy. Finally, we consider disciplinary practices around skeletal collections, and imagine new ways for the field to approach the excavation, curation, analysis, interpretation, and disposition of peoples’ ancestors.

Decolonizing Bioarchaeology: Responsibilities to the Past, Present, and Future

In this year's invited lecture, "A Politics without Authenticity: Thinking through the Pitfalls and Potentialities of ‘Fake’ in Armenia", Dr Tamar Shirinian highlights the contradictions that plague the “information age”. Information travels fast and much depends on it but, information is haunted by the possibility of inauthenticity. Information is a critical component of modern political economy and has always been subject to manipulation and inauthenticity. In this age, particularly, “fake news” as a rhetoric has emerged to signal how false information spreads rapidily and with the potential for virality; contaminating other sites of knowledge and with little to trace its origins. The notion of “fake news” contaminates all information • pointing to the possibility that if it exists then all other information is also suspect. “Fake news” as a major topos of information politics has produced a reality in which authenticity is no longer a foundation for the political, and where political positions and decisions are driven • sometimes expressly • by emotion and affect rather than facts. In this talk, I interrogate the emergence of the rhetoric of “fake” as a political signifier in Armenia. Investigating Fakebook profiles (fake social networking pages), the right-wing discourse of NGOs as fakes, as well as information coming from official national and international sources as already suspect and thus fake, I contemplate this new era in which “truth” may no longer be the basis of political action. In this context, however, I show how there might be potentialities of a politics without authenticity.

Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing (CASTAC) Invited Lecture with Dr Tamar Shirinian: "A Politics without Authenticity: Thinking through the Pitfalls and Potentialities of ‘Fake’ in Armenia"

This conversation will bring to the meeting Professor Danny Miller (Univ College London), director of a newly completed multisited global ethnography study, the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/assa/about/), and two post-doctoral researchers from the project, Xinyuan Wang and Charlotte Hawkins. The project consists of simultaneous 16-month field-based ethnographies conducted in ten field sites across the globe, from February 2018 to June 2019, focusing on mid-age and older adults. Smartphones and other digital technologies are now central to the experience of older people, whether in terms of accessing information about health, socializing with others, or organizing their lives during retirement. The researchers also explored how generational understanding and use of smartphones, especially for accessing health information and enabling translocal systems of care might be impacted by inequality. Smartphones are equally important in creating a new form of collaborative and comparative anthropology which will be represented by the eleven volumes the project is publishing. The conversation will be moderated by Maria Cattell and Jay Sokolovsky who have each logged in over 4 decades of traditional ethnographic research with Sokolovsky having recently published one of the first multimedia enabled ethnographies. In the midst of rapidly transforming translocal and transnational engagement of generations this conversation ultimately explores three grand issues: 1. As a successor to the global “Project A.G.E.” (Age, Generation and Experience), carried out in the 1980s, how does the ASSA Project move forward a comparative, cross-cultural understanding of older adulthood in the 21st Century? 2. Can the methodological efforts of the ASSA project properly transcend what Gabriele de Seta calls “the three lies of digital ethnography”? These are: illusions of the networked field-weaver, the eager participant-lurker and the expert fabricator. 3. How do the methods of the ASSA project inform anthropology about the possibilities of fieldwork and research dissemination in the age of COVID?

Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing: Exploring the future of multimodal-digital ethnography

Anthropologists are currently engaged in the problems of policing and racism in a variety of ways, some with police and others with communities most impacted by intensive policing. Their roles have ranged from cultural expert, research consultant, acute observer of the everyday, and as critical analysts of language and policy. Invoking these roles, this panel engages with current police reform efforts to include a) technological innovations, b) changes in laws and rules about police stops, summonses, use of force, decriminalizing cannabis, and accountability, c) training in areas such as implicit bias, cultural awareness and community engagement, and d) coordination with other agencies and experts when responding to youth, family or mental health problems. They ask, But does this burst of reform across the country amount to a significant shift in policing or is largely a scramble to keep the current system in place?

Anthropological Engagements with Policing, pt. 2: working to imagine solutions

Anthropology has a long, if not well understood, history of engagements with policing. Since the 19th century, police work has created the material conditions which enable anthropological research in many field sites, especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Conversely, the theoretical work of anthropologists have served as foundational justifications for regimes of policing. For example, both the ‘criminal anthropology’ of Lombroso and the anthropométrie judiciare of Alphonse Bertillon were attempted engagements with contemporary anthropological problems such as parsing competing philosophical claims of free will, rationality, and the materiality of the body. This dialog extends through the work of Malinowski on informal social control mechanisms--central to much of the conceptual infrastructure of “community policing,” “broken windows” and “order maintenance” initiatives--and various iterations of cultural theory, from “culture of poverty” frameworks through contemporary engagements with “police culture.” Even today, amidst an anthropological profession nominally committed to racial and social justice, anthropologists continue a challenging pathway towards engaging with police and policing, as collaborators, interlocutors, antagonists and as objects of study in themselves. This panel, the first of two related sessions, will explore the legacies of such engagements--paying particular attention to the challenges and pitfalls they engender.

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Deferred and Delayed: Temporalities of Law

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