United States

Within museums, archives, and libraries, there is increasing interrogation of established knowledge structures and their power to represent. Presenters in this Roundtable will share our experiences, frustrations, and aspirations working with the data systems surrounding institutionalized cultural collections as stewards and researchers. With the audience, we will begin a conversation exploring interest and direction for a collaborative survey of Collections Management Systems built for/with/around Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and values of knowledge sovereignty. The organizers approach this topic through our positionality as professionals of European settler and immigrant colonial heritage working with global collections of tangible and intangible culture. We believe a comparative survey could help decolonize broader museum and archival praxes by defining lessons from community-centered knowledge stewardship relevant to universalist CMS’s (for example, based on Library of Congress, Museum Nomenclature, Getty, and other controlled schema). There has been a vibrant proliferation of community-led initiatives in the space of IKS, both using open-source platforms (exp., Mukurtu, GRASAC GKS, Keeping Culture KMS) and bespoke systems (exp., Sqewlets Website Project). A synthetic understanding of these methods, data structures, values, and outcomes could clarify common strategies and improve critical data practices in both colonially- and community-held collections. This conversation builds on the American Alliance of Museums&#39; 2018 report Words Matter: Lexicon Usage and Indigenous Cultural Belongings and other recent critical studies in the field.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

A Conversation on Community-led Databases: Surveying Methods of Knowledge Sovereignty

information technology

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.

Within museums, archives, and libraries, there is increasing interrogation of established knowledge structures and their power to represent. Presenters in this Roundtable will share our experiences, frustrations, and aspirations working with the data systems surrounding institutionalized cultural collections as stewards and researchers. With the audience, we will begin a conversation exploring interest and direction for a collaborative survey of Collections Management Systems built for/with/around Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and values of knowledge sovereignty. The organizers approach this topic through our positionality as professionals of European settler and immigrant colonial heritage working with global collections of tangible and intangible culture. We believe a comparative survey could help decolonize broader museum and archival praxes by defining lessons from community-centered knowledge stewardship relevant to universalist CMS’s (for example, based on Library of Congress, Museum Nomenclature, Getty, and other controlled schema). There has been a vibrant proliferation of community-led initiatives in the space of IKS, both using open-source platforms (exp., Mukurtu, GRASAC GKS, Keeping Culture KMS) and bespoke systems (exp., Sqewlets Website Project). A synthetic understanding of these methods, data structures, values, and outcomes could clarify common strategies and improve critical data practices in both colonially- and community-held collections. This conversation builds on the American Alliance of Museums' 2018 report Words Matter: Lexicon Usage and Indigenous Cultural Belongings and other recent critical studies in the field.

panel

This conversation provides an anthropological analysis of life narratives and sinuous legal trajectories of Afghan refugees on the move across Europe. It is based on first-hand ethnographic observations, gathered during two field trips to Calais (France) and to the Chios and Lesvos islands (Greece), conducted by Nataliya Tchermalykh and Alexander Ephrussi in May-August 2021. Based on several months of intense fieldwork, our conversation will provide snapshots of Afghan lives, as they move through states and continents. Navigating within the nets of local and global infrastructures of humanitarian aid, this conversation will illustrate how refugees negotiate their passage with different individuals - NGO-workers, lawyers, local populations, as well as the agents of law enforcement, cost guards, and asylum case-workers, enforcing the European borders on earth, on sea, and on paper. In late summer 2021, while the Taliban troops were advancing across Afghanistan at an unprecedented pace, we were documenting the everyday lives of Afghan refugees on the remote Greek islands (Chios and Lesvos), under a constant threat of the most dreadful forest fires in Greek history. Focusing specifically on the access to justice of refugee populations, we gathered their life narratives, opinions and accounts of the recent epidemiological and geopolitical emergencies, such as COVID-19 pandemics, Brexit, recent Franco-British and Greco-Turkish intergovernmental tensions and decisions, as well as the withdrawal of the American troops from Afghanistan. These emergencies directly affected the lives of the inhabitants of the camps and their alentours and added to the fragmentation of the already complex social fabric of the refugee lives across Europe. We left our last field site on the 15th of August - the day when the Taliban took control of Kabul. By laying the focus on social and legal trajectories of Afghan migrants across and beyond Europe, the aim of this conversation is to come to a deeper understanding of the dynamic relationship between the life narratives, the law and the space, as it is configured in European border zones, while shedding light, however indirectly, to the ongoing situation in Afghanistan. Nataliya Tchermalykh is a legal anthropologist, studying the imaginaries of law and justice in different parts of Europe, with a particular focus on the work of legal professionals, acting as interfaces between the states, the supra-state entities and the vulnerable populations. Alexander Ephrussi is a social anthropologist and a German-English-Dari translator, specializing in recent Afghan diasporas in Europe.

Afghan lives in European refugee camps: life narratives, law(lesness), and hopes for justice. A conversation between Nataliya Tchermalykh and Alexander Ephrussi

Deep-seated colonial and racist roots undergird the field of anthropology as a whole and biological anthropology in particular. Once replete with notions of eugenics, typologies, assimilation, and racial hierarchies, the field has evolved, and reflexive trends have challenged researchers and practitioners to confront these oppressive ideologies. When turning the ethnographic gaze upon ourselves, we ask, how do we as professionals continue to reproduce inequity, inequality, and violence within our own discipline--and how can we avoid this? This session focuses on anthropology’s professional responsibility to our own field and our colleagues, as well as how diversity and inclusion can improve our professional practice.  This roundtable is inspired by several timely events. Following a unilateral decision made by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) in 2020 to disband the Anthropology Section’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, forensic anthropologists erupted in animated and contentious dialogue regarding the merit, need, objectives, and vision of diversity and inclusion for biological anthropologists. Concurrently, a letter to the editor of the Journal of Forensic Sciences (Bethard & DiGangi 2020) and a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (DiGangi & Bethard 2021) called for the dismantling of forensic notions of “ancestry,” as it perpetuates the disproven biological race concept that persists in American culture, among enacting other harms. Additionally, numerous events throughout the year have highlighted persistent issues around the care of human remains, along with the human rights laws (i.e., NAGPRA) and ethics which supposedly protect them. However, it is clear that such abuses and indifference to--or chastisement of--the responses they provoke continue to signal to under-represented scholars that they are unwelcome. Given that biological anthropologists are first anthropologists, and issues surrounding diversity and antiracism are also being confronted by sociocultural anthropologists, primatologists linguists, and archaeologists, this conversation creates a space for anthropologists across subdisciplines to bridge professional organizations, efforts, and specializations to effect change across the field as a whole. In particular, we will interrogate two pressing questions: 1) what is Anthropology’s professional responsibility to inclusivity, antiracism,and anti-oppression within the field?; and 2) how can relationships between the subfields be leveraged to produce actionable, substantive change across the discipline?

What is Anthropology’s Professional Responsibility to Anti-Oppression Action and Inclusion within the Field?

This session looks at an experience familiar to anthropologists: the unfinished project. Work we have yet to complete often weighs on our mind, because we intended to complete the task but were ultimately defeated by time, by other responsibilities, by forces beyond our control. Indeed, the reasons a project are left unfinished may differ, depending on the stage of our careers, on the priorities in anthropology at the time, or by a host of other reasons. Now as we consider our commitments and inclinations going forward, what role should completion of these projects take in the absorption of our limited time? The papers in this session consider such unfinished business. This may have been in a long-term field-site research or perhaps in a newly started project we had to leave for a while and always meant to return to. It could be ethnographic, conceptual, analytical • or a combination thereof, a manuscript half-finished that was abandoned for some reason now forgotten or a particular piece of research only half done. Such unfinished business preys on our conscience, because it was never written up, or it was dropped for reasons long forgotten, or was almost finished but put aside, perhaps temporarily, when circumstances forced us to move onto something else. This session offers the opportunity, in a relatively formal setting, to examine the whys and wherefores of this very common issue, to revisit the project itself, and possibly to provide the impetus for suggesting various ways of completing it.

Unfinished Business! Part Two

Over the last several decades, the Dalai Lama has championed the preservation of Tibetan cultural heritage and the endowments it offers the global community in greater mental health, well-being and sustained happiness through its rich contributions in contemplative thought and practice. In this effort, he has actively supported and engaged in collaborations with scientists to investigate physiologic and psychologic changes that these contemplative practices engender in order to provide evidence of their benefits and encourage greater integration of practices supporting happiness and well-being globally. He has framed such initiatives under a paradigm of a universal responsibility to support greater global wellness, and a commitment to uncovering the truth of such determinants through rich conversations across different intellectual traditions, epistemological angles, geographic populations and cultural frameworks. One of the phenomena that has gained particular attention is that of tukdam (Tib., thugs dam), a meditative state achieved at the time of death in which the practitioner gains ultimate realization into the nature of mind. In this practice, the practitioner also suspends the normal chronology of physiologic processes at the time of death, including postponing rigor mortis, putrefaction and decay for up to three weeks, and maintaining a suppleness and radiance to the skin and complexion. This panel will explore themes of truth and responsibility through epistemic anthropological angles that investigate different approaches, methodologies and assumptions in the research on tukdam. These different approaches draw from constituencies situated within neuroscience, biomedicine, anthropology, STS, and religious studies fields, as well as those from Buddhist, Tibetan medical and Tibetan cultural communities. Paper presentations will look at how research teams aim to explore a uniquely cultural approach to death and dying, the way it informs understandings of normal death processes, and its potential applications to wider populations and aims. The presentations and discussant perspectives will highlight the competing truths and responsibilities that these multidisciplinary investigations uncover in conceptualizations of an ideal death, a life well-lived, valuing cultural heritage and ‘responsible’ investigations in the sciences and humanities. Presentations will draw upon the ongoing research of the foremost multidisciplinary teams and researchers engaged in the study of tukdam. Panelists will also explore the points of intersection between scientific research on tukdam and the Tibetan lay and religious contexts in which tukdam plays an important structural role in shaping local paradigms and perspectives on wellness, health, and end-of-life care. The panel invites attendees to reflect with them upon the following: to what degree are the various and overlapping constituencies in this research asked to respond, reflect, and incorporate the different modes of evidence underlying such truths? To whom is this research giving evidence and to what ends? And finally, in what ways do the multiple paradigms employed in tukdam research shape the kinds of “truth” that could be uncovered?

Tukdam Phenomenon: Paradigms in Shaping Ontological Realities, Discourses with Science, and Tibetan Cultural Identity

A Biocultural Nexus of Tibetan Medical Diagnostics Linking Perceptual Cues and Biomarkers to Track an Ideal Death in a Tibetan Community Context

Death and Happiness: Exploring the Temporalities of the Meditated Death and Everyday Life in Tibetan Buddhist Practice of Tukdam

Donald J. Trump was a president “the likes of which we have never seen before.” His communication style, adversarial posturing, flirtation with violence, loose relationship with the truth, fascination with military might, admiration of authoritarian rulers, and ability to dominate the 24-hour news cycle secured the rapt attention of national and international audiences. The domination of the news cycle was masterful, as the president•celebrity mogul and salesman extraordinaire•wielded his talents of showmanship to titillate, impress, intimidate, demean, discredit, distract, and incite. The entanglement of performance and power rarely has been clearer. International trade deals, nuclear disarmament negotiations, special counsel investigations, impeachment proceedings, and an attack on the Capitol Building all unfolded before an audience of millions transfixed by rough displays of intimidation, cruelty, and the incitement of violence. Charges of insurrection, illegality, ethics violations, transgressions of authority, corruption, and civil and human rights violations haunted Trump’s administration, and each strike for power was wrapped with dramatic flourish. While the Trump presidency has ended, Trumpism endures, a political era in which taunting, brandishing weapons, and intimations of violence in public spaces and on social media have been normalized. This panel considers the responsibilities of anthropologists in this tense reverberation of a political moment. What insights can and should anthropologists contribute to national conversations about such a formation of political culture? Do ready-made analytical frameworks such as authoritarianism, fascism, democracy, nationalism, populism, demagoguery, “presidential behavior,” and the theater state illuminate current developments, or do such terms obscure and confound our understanding? How do we envision our audiences and how do those decisions affect the outlets for our work and styles of expression? How can we engage with these political developments and withstand accusations of “bias”? What is the dividing line between research and political action? While recognizing that objectivity is ultimately unachievable, and that fealty to that concept can buttress forms of oppression, how can we talk with audiences about scholarship about politics when they might be expecting “objectivity”? Given that citizens live in separate media bubbles and trust different sources of authority, will the commentary of anthropologists resound or fall flat? What in the AAA Code of Ethics prepares us for this moment, and when writing about a presidency, whom do we identify as the “subjects” of our research? Presenters in this panel will discuss their scholarship on political culture in the era of Trumpism, with special attention to the dramaturgical exercise of power and the exploitation of white (masculine) supremacy for entertainment.

Premium content

A Conversation on Community-led Databases: Surveying Methods of Knowledge Sovereignty

Downloads

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Afghan lives in European refugee camps: life narratives, law(lesness), and hopes for justice. A conversation between Nataliya Tchermalykh and Alexander Ephrussi

Similar lecture

Unfinished Business! Part Two

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES