United States

What is the relationship between Native Americans and museums? To explore this question, this roundtable discussion panel brings into conversation European and U.S. anthropologists and American Indians Studies scholars on the natures, sources, and truths of past and present best practices that enable culturally competent collaborations between Native American communities and individuals and museum practitioners. The discussions and presentations on this panel illuminate examples of responsible effective collaboration that lend to the creation of exhibits which expand museum practices while respecting Native American aims and their right to funerary objects and cultural patrimony under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The timely nature of this panel is supported by changing museum practices that are direct precipitates of Native American contestation and truths of culturally insensitive relationships with institutions and recognition by museum professionals of the need for paradigm expansion.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Native Americans and Museums: 
International Perspectives and Collaborative Prospects.

native americans

museum anthropology

museums

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

Narratives are primary “truth-telling” instruments that states have used in legitimizing their nation-building efforts, mobilizing citizens in social engineering projects, and pushing forward their ideological agendas. They are also important tools for social groups to construct and maintain identity and solidarity more generally. This is especially significant today in the context of the global crisis of rising nationalism, populism, division and polarization. Based on in-depth ethnographic accounts, textual-analysis and other methods, our roundtable aims to understand cultural milieus, sociopolitical tensions, embodied practices that are involved in nation-states’ and social groups’ inventing, promoting or circulating narratives across different social domains and in the context of distinct regimes of power. On a theoretical level, within a broad, psychological anthropology framework, this panel advocates a “narrative anthropology” approach that places narrative as the center of analysis and articulates an expanded notion of narrative: 1) narrative is considered as a form of semiotic mediation, where narrative tools shape speaking and thinking; 2) narrative analysis also attends to psychological processes including cognition, human emotion and embodiment; and 3) competing narratives are involved in speaking and thinking about truth in national and global contexts. This approach emphasizes the unique contributions of narrative analysis to interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration between anthropology, humanities and cognitive science.  The participants in our roundtable will draw from their individual research projects to provide numerous ethnographic insights from the U.S.,Russia, Georgia, and Central America and across various social domains, and bring these case studies into theoretical dialogue. James V. Wertsch outlines a theoretical blueprint for narrative anthropology, and his paper articulates a proposal for situating narrative anthropology within a broader movement in the social sciences. Nutsa Batiashvili examines nationalist historiography in the Soviet and Post-Soviet South Caucasus to show how national narratives produce both mental and embodied predispositions. Doc Billingsley’s paper, an ethnography of historical memory among K’iche’ Maya communities in the Guatemalan Highlands, reveals two patterns in their narratives and demonstrates how Maya youth draw upon these narratives to craft and revitalize their ethnolinguistic identities. Anna Jacobson’s research, located in a local VA hospital and through a local Hospice Care organization in St. Louis, Missouri, examines how fundamental ethics of care and care interactions are created through the sharing of life stories that re-insert dignity and meaning into otherwise dehumanized spaces. Taken together, our panel highlights the role of narrative in linking truth, nation-states, social groups and individuals’ lived experience.

Narrative Anthropology: Identity, Truth, and Narrative Mediation

This roundtable discusses how accusations of “terrorism” and “radicalization” are disrupting the ordinariness of everyday interactions. Since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, and more recently with the terrorist attacks in various European metropoles, we have witnessed a growing countering violent extremism (CVE) industry across the private and public sectors that aims to prevent “radicalization” and terrorism. The increasing amounts of money, barrages of policies, and exceptional legal measures targeting potential terrorists have changed the relation between Western majorities and Muslim minorities fundamentally.  Through ethnographic examples the roundtable investigates how accusations of “terrorism” and “radicalization” are used to declare states of exception and disrupt everyday interactions. In anthropology, the everyday has been described as a site of encounter and interaction (Lambek, Das). However, the introduction of various counterterrorism and counter-radicalization measures have turned the “everyday” into an arena of suspicion and surveillance. To governments, “the everyday” has become a site where one can identify the transition from “normal” to “extreme” (Danish National Center for Prevention of Extremism, 2020). Social workers, teachers, and networks of mothers are trained to identify signs of potential radicalization across social domains as varied as social work, youth work, education, arts, and within families.  This roundtable discusses how the growing CVE industry inscribes a logic of “exceptionality” into the everyday and how this logic of exception becomes contested and challenged. We ask what kinds of violence are acknowledged or ignored within such a context? How does one live an ordinary life when the ordinary (such as clothes, child-rearing and religious practices) has become the target of exceptionalism? What kind of sociability and solidarities are enabled or rendered impossible? And how does one practice engaged anthropology within this context without becoming the target of exceptionalism oneself?

Muslim Lives in the Global War on Terror. Exceptionalizing the Everyday

In the Chinese language, “family” and “home” is the same word: jia. The convergence of these two concepts can perhaps explain why Chinese culture writ large has long been associated with family harmony in the collective imagination. The reality, of course, has never been so simple: the home has always been a site of contestation where social values are negotiated and reconfigured. Recent social changes have further widened the gap between what home ought to be and what it actually is. This roundtable seeks to examine the enactment of ideologies of home in everyday life, as well as the myriad ways in which people react or adjust when realities fall short of idealized expectations. Together, we ask a number of questions that critically assess the meanings and emotional valences of the concept of “home” as both physical space and as lived experience. What is home supposed to feel like, and how does one cope when these feelings cannot be found among family members? Can the aesthetic mood of home be reproduced in commercial spaces, in medical settings, between neighbors, or among strangers? What are the psychological effects of being denied a home, either by virtue of circumstance or as a result of damaged family relations? In societies where individuals are constrained, to varying degrees, by rigid expectations of kin relations, what possibilities exist for creating a home on one’s own terms? In our efforts to answer these questions, the participants in this roundtable will draw from their individual research projects to provide numerous insights from across the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Sonya Pritzker and Teresa Kuan illuminate how people in therapeutic environments re-conceptualize family relationships and idealized, gendered notions of family in the wake of China’s so-called “psycho-boom.” Emma An explores the fine line between care and control in families with autistic youths, arguing that the home can become a site of intimate surveillance wherein parents exclude their children from public life in order to protect them. Looking at how “home” can be re-imagined at the other end of the life course, Claudia Huang examines how changing attitudes about old age have brought about commensurate changes in how elders view the prospect of growing old in an eldercare institution rather than with their families. Finally, by revisiting Arthur and Margery Wolf’s previously unanalyzed field notes, Jing Xu offers a helpful historical corrective on assumptions about “the Chinese family” in general and the role of peer socialization among children in particular.

Home away from home: reconsidering expectations of the “Chinese family life”

There are over one hundred sixty thousand (>160,000) abandoned hard rock mines in the Western United States, and many of them are on Native American lands (Lewis, Hoover, and Mackenzie 2017). Worldwide there is a well-documented dialectical relationship between transnational mining corporations and local Indigenous communities. Stuart Kirsch claims that “mining companies and indigenous peoples regard each other as their greatest threat” (2014, 8). Numerous studies have been published on an array of environmental health effects from living near abandoned mine lands (AMLs), and abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) in particular. This problem becomes even more concerning in the “mineral age,” a term that indicates the global expansion and intensification of mineral resource extraction, and the social and environmental impacts that have occurred since the beginning of the twenty-first century (Jacka 2018). Given the scale and magnitude of the problem of AMLs and AUMs, and because this trend is accelerating, this session will focus on different manifestations of the mineral age in ethnographic detail, and account for deeper historical conditions that have contributed to this current moment of extraction. What is emergent or seemingly new, qualitatively different, about energy and mineral resource extraction in the last two decades, and what historical circumstances become relevant for understanding these situations? What lessons can be drawn from AMLs in our respective fields of study for a broader, international audience•Indigenous and non-Native communities around the world who have been impacted by and are responding to an increasing number of AMLs? There are different, often conflicting historical periodizations of the growth and development of industrial mining and metallurgy, which offer political coordinates of inquiry and intervention. Against the claims that tend to naturalize and normalize mining as something all civilizations have done•the actual bedrock underlying cultural epochs•we seek to describe the qualitative differences of late industrial extraction in the mineral age, and the dialectical relationship between settler-colonial regimes of mineral and energy resource extraction and Indigenous lives and livelihoods. This session will explore interdisciplinary possibilities for collaboration with environmental health scientists, Native and non-Native community partners, policy-makers, and regulatory agencies in co-designing “interventions” to attenuate environmental health risks and impacts from heavy metals exposures from AMLs. In this roundtable session, we will discuss the following themes at the intersection of political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), and critical Indigenous studies of settler colonialism: • Indigenous data sovereignty and research autonomy • Settler-colonial determinants of health • Toxic infrastructures of mineral and energy resource extraction • Social science collaboration in environmental health sciences • Critical multi-stakeholder analysis • Community-based participatory research (CBPR) • Tribal or traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) • Comparative epistemology and relational ontology • Decolonizing methodologies • Critical Indigenous STS and Native science • Ethnographic refusal and scalable scholarship

From Legacies of Extraction to Environmental Health Governance: Collaborative Research and Responses to the Impacts of Mining in Indigenous Communities

At a moment when economic inequality is ravaging the lives of people across the globe, anthropologists have an obligation to critically interrogate the processes through which financial worlds and futures are made. Who bears responsibility for the financial crises and coups that have devastated the lives of many, and significantly enriched an elite few? How can anthropological knowledge be used to not only bear witness to the making of financial futures, but also to challenge the claims upon which they are founded and the practices through which they are forged? Bringing together a diverse group of scholars working at both the graduate and post-graduate level, this roundtable panel seeks to address these questions. It engages scholarship in the anthropology of finance and the anthropology of the future to consider how futures, both collective and individual, are financed, and how finance, in turn, shapes imaginings and experiences of the future. By exploring the making of financial futures across a range of ethnographic contexts the panel asks: How does financial expertise become an organizing discourse that mediates people’s understandings of temporality, risk and possibility? How are prisms of truth and responsibility reconstituted by these emergent set of experts? How are financial figures, forecasts, and ratings discursively and ideologically deployed to generate "objective" forms of economic knowledge and financial "truth"? How does the construction of "objective" financial knowledge serve to deepen indebtedness and exacerbate inequality by asymmetrically assigning financial responsibilities? Collectively, the goal of this roundtable is two-fold. First, to illuminate the ideological and cultural underpinnings of what often appear as inviolable financial truths. And second, to demonstrate that anthropological knowledge can play a vital role in creating futures that are more equitable, heterogeneous and inclusive, rather than controlled by powerful self-serving financial elites.

Financing the Future: Truth, Responsibility, and the Making of Financial Worlds

According to anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (2019), “We can continue to make anthropology matter for the world if we keep it a space where we can speak freely unpopular truths and offer criticisms of the common sense, based on what we study and know.” In a current moment marked by various manifestations of violence against migrants and other historically marginalized communities, these words cannot be more timely. This roundtable is an invitation to explore “the courage of truth.” Bringing together ethnographers of the Puerto Rican diaspora to discuss new and emerging scholarship, we offer historical and contemporary critiques of the U.S. empire, as well as discuss the complex realities of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. diaspora within an intersectional context. We will address questions, such as: How does Puerto Rican ethnography disrupt commonsense narratives of Puerto Ricans in the continental United States? Similarly, how does Puerto Rican ethnography shed a light on activism and resistance in the diaspora? How might an analysis of decolonial movements help us envision a more inclusive anthropology of Puerto Ricans and other Latinxs in the diaspora? What responsibilities do we have as scholars of the diaspora to our interlocutors and the communities we write about?

Ethnographic truths: Puerto Rican Migration, Race, and Resistance

Quoting a fellow activist in a 2012 article titled, “Decolonizing Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity and Toward a Practice of Decolonization,” Harsha Walia writes, “Decolonization is a dramatic reimagining of relationships with land, people and the state. Much of this requires study. It requires conversation. It is a practice; it is an unlearning.”  Assembling a diverse gathering of perspectives and insights, this session argues that the time for reimaging relationships and for an unlearning is overdue in the educational frameworks that have defined sustainable agriculture and food systems (SAFS) for much of its history as a subject of study and field of practice. Anthropology, as a discipline both marred by colonial histories and presents, and an active space of decolonization, offers unique vantage points into the education around SAFS. The conventional whitewashed canon of SAFS’s narrative, in both educational and popular contexts, places its origins and evolution with a handful of European and Euro-American “pioneers” and “visionaries.” In old and familiar narratives of discovery and proprietorship, we know that many of these “pioneering” works are in fact, based not on original knowledge, but on a millennia-old foundation of indigenous and peasant farming and food production. The fact that many domains have been stewarded by women, has remained obscured in dominant narratives. So too have the contributions of non-white agricultural scientists like George Washington Carver and Booker T. Whatley. While recent challenges by BIPOC and LGBTQ participants and commentators promise to redefine these narratives, countervailing forces are also emerging that seek to erase the long-fought and hard-won progress of food justice in favor of more “neutral” discourses amenable to market-based solutions and/or financialization.  This panel will both recognize and celebrate the contributions of groups of people and individuals whose stories and contributions to the development of SAFS have been obscured or erased. It seeks to interrogate and destabilize the historical and cultural processes that have led to dominant and dominating narratives of SAFS, drawing on ethnographic and autoethnographic insights. In doing so, we challenge the normative pedagogies, discourses, and legacies of what Devon Pena identifies as “settler colonial sustainable agriculture,” and to offer a revisionist framework that is befitting a diversified sustainable agriculture pedagogy in the age of Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and other specific BIPOC and LBTQIA contributions to the history, theory, and practice of sustainable agriculture and food systems.

Decolonizing Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Education

In the 'Critical Reflexivity in Global Health and Global Change Studies' roundtable, panelists converse about the ways in which defining moments in human and ecosystems health cause us to reflect upon our understanding of our own work as well as the work of our fellow anthropologists and scholars across disciplines. In our conversation we highlight constraints and affordances to multispecies wellbeing that we have become newly or increasingly aware of due to the acuteness of the current crises, and we embed our analyses within a deep historical context. With lenses tinted by recent events, panelists use social theory to push beyond rote and etic explanations of the relationships between environmental change and global health. Panelists approach the roundtable with a sense of incredible urgency to mitigate health inequities and environmental injustices. In light of the recent and ongoing pandemics, anthropologists have critical roles to play in performing research, disseminating results, and translating scientific discourse for public audiences. We are also obliged to advocate for the consideration of biocultural diversity in policy development and for the application of scientific knowledge in decision making. Who should anthropologists prioritize in our inquiries, how, and why? If anthropologists were first responders, who would we care for first? Panelists in the Critical Reflexivity in Global Health and Global Change Studies session advocate for the wellbeing of humans and nonhumans as well as for healthy environments by targeting a variety of biopolitical issues. We address important convergences between the dynamic, complex, emerging contexts for living on Earth and the ways people sense, perceive, experience, and know their own and others’ bodies. We link ethnographic records of local, lived, experiences related to wellbeing to broader social and ecological processes. In what ways have contemporary crises demonstrated the continuing significance of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, geography, and other dimensions of power and status, vulnerability and marginalization, stratification and inequality? Why do health care and environmental justice continue to operate along these lines? As we explore the conditions for living in problematic situations, panelists discern caretaking from imperialism, protecting from policing, freedom from privilege, and agency from structural violence. We examine local, regional, national, and international projects that accomplish equitable improvements in wellbeing as well as projects that impede or damage wellbeing. We inquire into the operations of governmental, humanitarian, development, conservation, biomedical, public health, and other initiatives that intervene in local people’s lives and landscapes. Our aim is to advance scholarship across disciplines and to transcend academia by contributing to public debates and informing public policies. As environmental and health crises in the 21st century press heavily upon one another, this roundtable convenes to critically analyze links between continuous transformations on Planet Earth and changes in multispecies wellbeing.

Critical Reflexivity in Global Health and Global Change Studies

In November 2021, the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (CEV) will release their final report on the Colombian armed conflict. This roundtable brings together anthropologists from diverse social, geographical, and institutional locations - including scholar-practitioners - to discuss the practical, methodological, and pedagogical implications of the CEV’s work and final report. It is one of the first truth commissions in the world to develop an explicitly intersectional methodology that aims to bear witness to the complexities of the internal armed conflict, across the axes of generation, ability, gender, ethnicity, and diverse psychosocial impacts, and which aims to lay the foundations for coexistence and the non-repetition of violence. The completion of the CEV’s mandate this year raises significant and timely questions for anthropological inquiry into truth, recognition, responsibility, justice, and knowledge production: What • and whose • truths will be foregrounded (and obscured) in the final report? What methods, theories, and ethics shaped the CEV’s praxis of truth-telling and recognition of atrocities and harms? Created as a “temporary” state institution with a three-year mandate, how do the temporalities of institutionalized truth commissions shape - and constrain - possibilities for recognition and healing? How have grassroots leaders, CEV officials, and local and international liaisons negotiated, reworked, and refused the constraints of state-society relations on the ground? What narratives about the past will the CEV’s report produce, and how will these be communicated to different publics, as the first ever truth commission worldwide with a ‘pedagogy’ mandate? How will the CEV’s narratives about truth be received, appropriated and contested by different sectors Colombian society? And what impact will they have on the possibilities for peacebuilding?  This roundtable will direct ethnographic attention to the CEV in order to lift out the emergent possibilities, lessons learned, and limitations of truth-telling for generating accountability, recognition, and healing justice. This will be a bilingual, Spanish-English roundtable discussion.

Contested Truths: Narratives, Hopes and Fears from the Colombian Truth Commission

Ten years into South Sudan’s independence, the world’s newest nation-state is confronted by constant challenges, but alongside these uncertainties, new realities and potentialites have emerged. This roundtable, the first of its kind to exclusively focus on South Sudan in the history of AAA Annual Meetings, will bring together several scholars of South Sudan to discuss their insights on post-independence South Sudan. Discussing their own and each other’s work, their aim will be to suggest new lines of thinking that move beyond extant, limited framings of South Sudan’s situation as one of “crisis” and “failure.” Such notions, which characterize popular and academic understandings of South Sudan and postcolonial contexts more broadly, normalize neocolonial interventions while offering little sense of the lived realities, emerging dynamics, and complexities within such spaces. The discussants seek to explore how situations in South Sudan might be alternatively read as as processes of becoming, acts of re-making, or strivings toward future possibilities (Biehl and Locke 2017; Pink, Akama and Sumartojo 2018; Goldstone and Obarrio 2016). Drawing on the varied interests of the roundtable participants, the roundtable aims to explore the topics of medical humanitarianism, urban practices, peacemaking, displacement and return, gender dynamics and gender-based violence, and youth and education. Bringing together scholars from three continents discussing their recent and ongoing work on South Sudan, this roundtable will shed light on the stakeholders, designs, and mechanisms that are significant in the formation of a future-oriented South Sudan and illuminate ways in which domestic and international actors are engaged in this process. We are particularly interested in the liminal space(s) between uncertainties and hopes that carry political implications. Such a discussion will offer valuable insights for re-thinking precarity in challenged circumstances in postcolonial and conflict-affected spaces within Africa and across the globe. In keeping with the conference theme of 'Truth and Responsibility,' this discussion will also intervene in the long anthropological consideration of South(ern) Sudan stretching back to the long-debated colonial ethnography of E.E. Evans-Pritchard. With little sustained ethnographic work in South Sudan in the long period of civil war spanning the 1960s to 2006 (the work of Sharon Hutchinson and Jok Madut Jok being notable exceptions), this roundtable and its participants’ own work respond to a pressing need for a revitalized understanding of the lifeways and realities faced by people from cultural contexts famous to any scholar or student of anthropology. In reflecting on their own and each other’s research and insights, the participants will offer vibrant depictions of social and political worlds of South Sudanese people and people tied to South Sudan alongside new theoretical and methodological frames from which to un-think and re-think South Sudan.

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Native Americans and Museums: International Perspectives and Collaborative Prospects.

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