United States

Germany’s Willkomenskultur moment meant that refugees who arrived in Berlin around or after 2015 were met, initially, with the eager excitement of locals. Many of my refugee interlocutors subsequently engaged enthusiastically with cultural integration programs because it seemed to promise a solidification of these early moments of cultural contact, exchange and intimacy. Yet, as the initial excitement seems to increasingly give way to a resurgence of xenophobic sentiments across the country, this corresponding enthusiasm has been inflected by a deep ambivalence with regards to mimetic projects of self-transformation, particularly as they inform the internal experiences of selfhood in the lives of my refugee interlocutors. This paper explores how falsehood and authenticity become mediated through the endurance, or falling through, of newly forged relationships.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Accepting Germans: An Ethnographic Exploration of Refugee Integration in Berlin

intercultural

refugees

identity

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

My anthropological research project explores how the Slovenian reconciliationist project of retrieving 100,000+ human remains from mass graves of the Second World War and properly interring them is a project that reconfigures nationhood. Led by the government Commission on Concealed Mass Graves, this is an incipient campaign for post-communist transitional justice which brings to light crimes committed before Slovenian independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and pardoned for the sake of civil “peace” immediately after. In this project, I examine how the proper interment of Slovenia’s unknown war dead right now gives us new purchase to think about post-communist nationalism. The orienting device of my analysis is the Slovenian reconciliationists’ move to make proper interment of the war dead the central project of the transitional justice process. Interment first requires retrieval of victims: it requires hundreds of thousands of euros to be funneled into the project of digging bone fragments or “a blackish paste of human remains” from bombed-out mineshafts and staggeringly deep karst abysses. Retrieval is done at great personal risk. At some point in the interment process•“proper” interment being funerary rites, relocation, and ongoing care practices•the unidentifiable dead are absorbed into the Slovenian nation and accorded the care practices reserved for ancestors. This phenomenon defies historical scholarly portrayal of Eastern Europe, a region supposedly rife with immutable, long-standing ethnic divisions. My analysis of Slovenian reconciliationism thus opens a re-examination of the inter-relationships between justice, democracy, and collective memory.

Antigone's People: Interment as Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Slovenia

Gali is a so-called frozen conflict zone in the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia, separated from the rest of Georgia since the end of the Soviet Union. People from Gali have lived under protracted uncertainty and ambivalence for almost three decades. Opposing sovereignty projects•of Georgia, Abkhazia, and Abkhazia’s patron state Russia•impose themselves on people’s movements and rights through isolation, surveillance, and militarization. Despite its unpredictable shifts and arbitrariness, Gali people have generated ways to navigate this borderland over the years to sustain lives that are vitally dependent on formal and informal crossings. Since 2017, however, crises instigated by pests and viruses have introduced an unusual pattern of nonhuman border emergencies that people have to understand and struggle with. By focusing on three successive and related border emergencies caused by the “invasion” of brown marmorated stinkbugs, H1N1 virus, and COVID-19, this paper explores the new ways borders and interspecies mobilities are imagined under long-term conflict and uncertainty.

Unusual Suspects of a Contested Border: Uncertainty, Mobility, and Nonhuman Border Emergencies in the Margins of Georgia

In our scientific and cultural zeitgeist, the Anthropocene, tales of earthly dominance and irreversible planetary transformation feature the human civilization as both disruptive and geoengineerically savvy (Malhi 2017, Grusin 2017). The term elicited significant criticism, especially amongst the humanities and social sciences, for effectively “depoliticizing its causes and exonerating the energy-intensive capitalism” (Hecht 2018) and for colonizing our imaginations with imperial narratives of human exceptionalism (Jennings 2019). Aiming to destabilize the human-as-Man exceptionalism, scholars argue that “the figuration of humanity found in the tradition of the oppressed represents a series of distinct assemblages of what it means to be human in the modern world” (Weheliye 2015 p. 12). The Anthropocene, ultimately, fails to acknowledge such distinct assemblages of being human. Unlike the Anthropocene, which proclaims the language of the human species through a universalist geological commons, the Plantationocene offers a more historically situated origin story for our modern world. By placing the history of plantations at the core of capitalism, the Plantationocene points out the centuries-long dislocation, transportation and relocation of people and plants, the racialized violence and expansive systems of both enslaved and indentured labour, and the persistent extractive and simplifying logics that fundamentally altered ecologies. Not only are plantations still present, but their futures are also here. As the plantation morphs into the “prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors,” McKittrick (2013, p. 2) notes, the plantation emerges as “an ongoing locus of antiblack violence and death that can no longer analytically sustain this violence”. To attend to the complexities of race, space, death within plantation and its futures, McKittrick continues, requires decolonial thinking predicated on human life. Yet, what is human life in the Plantationocene? By adopting the Plantationocene as an analytical lens, this panel interrogates the category of the human. Specifically, it identifies the racial, capitalist, gendered and ecological mechanisms that produce and re-produce plantation logics and features of the human-as-Man exceptionalism. Also, it investigates how plantation-based multi-species becomings rework ontologies of embodiment and sensory orientation, potentially destabilizing the materialities of the capitalist world-space. Tyler Hook examines that educational and development projects in Liberia wherein he conceptualizes comparative international education and schooling as a plantation, thus pointing out the ongoing racialized exploitation, devaluation, and segregation of specific forms of labor, land/space, and epistemologies. Chris Keeve explores the vegetal and ecological materialities of Black life on colonized land, wondering how does one ask questions of the more-than-human when the human in comparison is already fraught. Sophie Moore critically assesses the relations between cotton and capitalism in Haiti, moving between historical analysis of the introduction of large-scale cotton production at the beginning of the 1920s and ethnographic reflection on the political ecology of the today’s global textile trade. Finally, Aida Arosoaie focuses on the representation of rubber plantations in Malaysian contemporary art, highlighting how postcolonial imaginaries of plantation lifeworlds position relations between land, human and more-than-human as an aesthetics of possibility and decolonization within plantations.

Being Human in the Plantationocene

Aesthetics of possibility within plantation lifeworlds Rubber in the life and work of Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman

Cotton and Capital: Haiti and the Fabric of Empire

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

Theorizing the Plantationocene in Educational Policy and Development

Anthropology off the Shelf Redux marks a return for the fifth in a series of AAA panels that began in 1999 and led to the volume of the same title, an anthology (2011) by 18 author-anthropologists reflecting on the art and the craft, the ethics and politics, the pains and promises of conveying ideas through narrative texts. Anthropologists have been telling stories to capture and interpret lived experience ever since ethnography as a writing genre emerged. Carole McGranahan calls this practice “theoretical storytelling,” a useful phrase that lends scholarly weight to material sometimes dismissed by critics as too descriptive and only tentatively anchored to research models that can be replicated and applied to confront glaring structural inequities. These include political catastrophes, moral disasters, and racialized, gendered and environmental violence. Yet interconnected debates about how to demonstrate the relevance of the discipline to real-world concerns, and speak truth to power have led to the current, wonderful moment where many anthropologists are engaged in praxis and the public sphere. Such engagement demands the use of multimodal techniques to amplify narrative voices in the dissemination of knowledge, and to facilitate interaction with increasingly diverse target audiences. In Anthropology off the Shelf Redux, participants on this roundtable offer reflections on their use of formats that are both riveting and critically grounded, including experimental writing, art, comix, visual ethnography, historical ethnography, performance and photography. We address core questions about what is gained and what is lost in the effort to stir a range of intellectual and sensory faculties, with the goal of enticing audiences to read, hear, view, reason, intuit, imagine and act on things anthropological.

Anthropology off the Shelf Redux: Multimodal Tools for 21st Century Social Action

The contemporary project aimed at creating a singular world is increasingly experienced through the plural, broken worlds it leaves in its wake. As recognizing and contesting partial realities becomes significant to survival in late industrial societies (Fortun 2014), the politics of sustaining lifeworlds increasingly becomes entangled with cosmological speculation. Such speculations are rife with both new possibilities as well as the closure of others. Indeed, toxic ecologies may degrade these lifeworlds, but they also hold within them the potential to induce sublime experiences (Pine 2019; Shapiro 2015). Algorithmic rhythms mime racial and imperial hierarchies even as they intesify forms of other-than-human speculation. A viral pandemic both demands and shakes faith in science. Secular statecraft is re-enchanted by ideas of otherworldly conspiracy and haunted by otherworldly sovereignty (Nugent 2010; Graeber and Sahlins 2017). Much of our mundane lives are occupied with navigating these broken worlds, a granular reckoning with the anthropocene that engenders intimacies simultaneously felt as both more-than-human and all-too-human (Dave 2014). The ontic disruptions caused by living in and across broken worlds are viscerally embodied as post-colonial uncertainties (Chakrabarty 2015, Mbembe 2001, Roy 2004) as well as de-colonial possibilities (Murphy 2017, Todd 2017, Tallbear 2015). They also constitute the grounds for renewed estrangements, hauntings of a persistent coloniality emboldened not only by precarious life conditions but by precarious world-views (Hage 2015). While the de-arrangement (Ghosh 2016) of modern worlding into plural worlds sometimes precipitates spectacular performances of ontological politics (de la Cadena 2015, Blaser 2016), we often navigate the brokenness of the non-modern present by performing a more mundane cosmopolitics (Stengers 1997) informed by fugitive planning (Moten and Harney 2013, Rosas 2018, Sojoyner 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway 2016, Hartman 2019, Klima 2019, Mclean and Pandian 2017), and more-than-human laboring (Besky et al 2014). Broken world thinking (Jackson 2014) and acting (Rai 2019, Simone 2019) weave together human survival with other-than-human conjurings (Bubandt 2018, Mahadeva 2015, Taneja 2017, Saraswati 2013). This panel explores the possibilities of an ethnographic encounter with contemporary broken worlds. It seeks to cultivate modes of ethnographic attention (Tsing 2015) capable of discerning a mundane cosmopolitics•widespread, endemic, and intimate•where extraordinary realms resonate with ordinary affects (Stewart 2007). It reflects on these themes through cosmological arrangements and re-arrangements wrought in diverse contexts across South Asia. From city-destroying floods in Karachi, the 'divine and demonic feminine' in Chittagong, to life-change fires in the Assamese hills, and the recapitulation of caste infrastructures in modern Bengaluru; the papers in this panel interrogate mundane cosmological exercises people assemble in what appear to be messianic times. While navigating broken worlds, how do interlocutors and ethnographers contend with irreducible ontic differences? How can ethnographic experimentation within cosmopolitical realities rework epistemic and ethical limits to engender new forms of responsibility and co-creation? How can ethnographies juxtapose broken realities to repair, regenerate, and proliferate intimate futures?

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