United States

In decolonial determinations to resist the modern ontological separation of nature from culture, people living in Andean Community countries increasingly recognize natural and cultural forces to be inextricably interrelated under the principle of the pluriverse (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018, Escobar 2019). After years of struggles led by Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and campesino communities, mobilizations by new social movements, and citizen activism, constitutional reforms affirmed the plurinational and intercultural natures of the region’s polities. Across the Andean Community region, communities articulate human rights and responsibilities ‘from below’, giving voice to political ontologies in which the agency of non-human actors features in the assertion of collective life projects. To what extent and how do such posthuman articulations reconfigure territory and the rights of humans, nature, and other beings? In this roundtable, our discussion is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples living in different coastal, Andean, and Amazonian regions of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Presenting research informed by ontological, multispecies, and posthuman approaches, discussants will recount how local communities are enacting life projects that rely on intimate relationships between human and non-human agents including plants, ecologies, and territorial animacies. We will show how across the Andean Community, ecocentric initiatives are maturing to advance agendas to reclaim territory, ensure the continued vitality of agrobiodiversity, and enact new models for biocultural rights governance.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Posthuman Rights Struggles and Environmentalisms from Below: Pluriversal Life Projects

political ecology

indigenous peoples

ontology

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

Reckoning with Dread: Dilemmas of Democracy When All Lives Don’t Matter

This year the United Nations celebrates the anniversary of the critical Fourth World Conference on Women, which helped to set the agenda for promotion of women’s human rights over the subsequent 25 years. The 64th meetings of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW, mostly cancelled due to Covid-19) were to connect the Beijing Platform for Action with other UN agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Sustainable Development Goals, in order to produce a new, effective, and legally binding declaration for discussion at the September 2020 UN General Assembly meeting. The International Women’s Anthropology Conference (IWAC) organized a panel discussion at CSW64 with five speakers offering anthropological insights on relevant issues such as women’s leadership potential, women’s role in environmental action, marginalized people defending their lands, and violence against women. The CSW64 panel is the basis for the proposed roundtable. This roundtable is in accord with the AAA 2020 theme, “Truth and Responsibility,” as we join the effort to introduce anthropological insights into the international discussion of women’s rights with full awareness of our responsibilities to our grassroots collaborators, and of their own senses of responsibility to each other, their cities, and their nations.

Grassroots Truths and Responsibilities: Anthropological Perspectives on Activism and Human Rights

In the middle of World War II and at the end of colonial rule, a young woman in Punjab, Mrs. A, met with family friend Dev Satya Nand as a willing participant in his new method of dream analysis. The case of Mrs. A appeared early in the career of Satya Nand, a prolific but little remembered figure in 20th century Indian psychiatry, who theorized complex connections between the mind and the social world, casting the psyche as an organic vehicle for ethical imagination. Mrs. A’s sessions with Dev Satya Nand included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. "The Doctor and Mrs. A" is a meditation on these worlds, dwelling in composite time frames drawn from archival and historical research, classics, and myth, as interacting forms or "moving structures." As Pinto analyzes the dynamic between Satya Nand and Mrs. A, she weaves temporalities of past experience with present reverie and future projection, frames not only for women's personal horizons, but for the broader possibilities of Indian psychoanalysis, mythology, and political concepts for a nation soon to be born. Rather than uncovering latent meanings as in Western psychoanalylsis, the dynamic between Satya Nand and Mrs. A is a profoundly regenerative one, gesturing to its own method. Playing with ideas not as content but as transformations in the arrangements of forms - such as place, idea and genre, drawn from disparate sources - enables us to imagine new and evocative scenes of inquiry. Mobilizing the voices of both analyst and analysand, Pinto reveals to us the possibility of thinking with a concept of "counter-ethics." In this roundtable, we discuss how "The Doctor and Mrs. A" compels us to reconsider several anthropological themes: questions of gender, power, and possibility; ethics from the standpoint of movement and change; imaginings of epistemic and moral canons; and finally, the place of art, mythology, and sidelined histories of science and method in conceiving truth and responsibility. What does it mean to consider ethical imaginations from another time and place - of immense social struggle, intimate voices and confused desires? What does such narrative demand of us today?

Counter-Ethical Scenes and Other Arrangements in an Indian Dream Analysis
A Roundtable on "The Doctor and Mrs. A," by Sarah Pinto

As the organizing principles of this year’s annual meeting, “truth” and “responsibility” urge anthropologists to turn inward by calling into question the very practices, beliefs, assumptions, and commitments that guide our scholarly inquiries In a discipline inclined to seek its truths by turning outward•if not directly towards the Other•this introspective exercise does not come easily. It not only asks us to reckon with our place in anthropology’s violent and extractive legacies, it also demands that we expand and explode our very understanding of what constitutes anthropological relevance. What are the consequences of this preoccupation with what and who lives outside or elsewhere? What gets erased, what goes unsaid, who is pushed to the margins or out of anthropology altogether? This panel is concerned with speaking to how the tension between Self/Other collides with the everyday conditions and culture of anthropology in academic departments, at our field sites, and within the discipline’s institutions. We seek to name elisions and silences and to address the shape and toll they take in the quotidian and microscopic processes of anthropological training and knowledge-making. How does it seep into anthropology’s pedagogical paradigms, particularly as they relate to methods training and core curricula? Why aren’t we able to acknowledge•as in the case of mental illness, for example (Parikh 2019)•how anthropologists experience and navigate the very structures and phenomena we interrogate in our scholarly work? Where, and how, do the politics of expertise intersect with the perpetual racialization of Black, Indigenous, and other non-White students? This forum asserts that the project of dismantling barriers to inclusion and equity requires laying bare and coming to terms with the inconvenient and uncomfortable. Within a framework of “radical honesty” (Williams 2016), the panelists approach these questions from their own experiences as a theoretical and pedagogical starting point for envisioning an anthropology invested in decolonial, queer, anti-imperial liberation. We also take prompt from Zora Neale Hurston, as well as this year’s theme, by tacking forth between questions and answers. What remains unresolved for those of us grappling with our commitment to a discipline haunted by colonial and imperial legacies? Where too, have we found answers•perhaps from our “elsewhere (Reese 2019), from our interlocutors, or from analytical frameworks outside of the Global North academy? In foregrounding the personal and quotidian, we explore the creative and productive potential in alternate modes of articulating, witnessing, theorizing, collaborating, and holding space for our fore bearers.

The Everyday Politics and Praxis of Truth, Responsibility and Honesty in Anthropology

The past two decades have seen a substantive change in the way that the ethnography of Jews and Jewishness has been conceived. In this “new Jewish ethnography,” anthropologists working on every continent approach the study of Jews and Jewish topics in ways that complicate the category of “Jew,” and bring profound insights to anthropological theory writ large. The current generation of ethnographers comes to the study of Jewish themes through our scholarly interests in core areas of anthropological theory and praxis, problematizing understandings of identity and practice through explorations of a diasporic, transnational, multiracial, multicultural “imagined community.” Further, we recognize the complex representational valences of Jewishness and the way these symbols are deployed, including in the absence of Jews. Increasingly working in the global periphery, ethnographers of Jewishness find that Jews in a wide range of contexts make use of the surrounding cultural idioms and reigning ideologies to make sense of their experience. In this new work, Jewish identity is understood as something experienced and practiced, contingent, syncretic, dynamic, and constructed • people engaged in complex subject formation • affirming that Jewishness is neither singular nor inherently “Jewish.” This roundtable brings together multiple generations of anthropologists, with institutional bases in four countries, and research in several geographical regions, to evaluate the state of the field and explore the intersecting themes that our research engages. These themes include: reconsiderations of the notion of “peoplehood” in light of contemporary genetic research and virtual community formation; the afterlives of research post-publication; multiple forms of cultural mediation through virtual engagements and representations of Jews in film and television; the relationships between fiction and ethnography (in writing and visual media); shifting racial-ethnic landscapes in which Jews are represented as people of color and/or uber-white or (re)cast themselves in racially disruptive terms; reconceptualizations of Jewish heritage through revitalization of Jewish languages, music and food traditions; contradictory forms of Jewish political engagement and the political uses of Jewish symbols; and the paradoxes of being “at home” without a “homeland,” where the “in-gathering” of the Jewish people is electronic, especially in the time of COVID.

Jews and the Idea of Jews: Ethnographic Disruptions

Over the past year, Lebanon has endured compounding financial, political, and social crises that have forced anthropologists, whether due to personal hardships or changes to field sites, to change their orientation to the discipline and practices of ethnography. Following the popular mass uprising of October 2019, Lebanon has witnessed a continued economic collapse, political instability, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the massive explosion at the Beirut Port in August 2020, all of which have impacted the way that anthropologists engage with their research topics and interlocutors. All of this has led to unpayable university tuitions, the loss of salaries of faculty and staff, and increased precarity for ethnographers••and local researchers in particular••working on the ground. Further, Lebanese security forces continue to use excessive force, try civilians in military courts, and prosecute activists for speech acts, stifling the forms of resistance and cooperation available to both local and foreign researchers. Despite Lebanon’s comparatively small size, its contested landscape has long helped anthropologists to understand the necessity of historicizing sociopolitical categories like “sect” in order to stress their modern politicization and mobilization in the midst of competing nationalisms. Lebanon has also offered a window into the ways in which gendered discourses of citizenship come to produce particular and limited understandings of the nation and citizenship. In recent decades, Lebanon had served as a place of tenuous refuge for well over a million Syrian, Palestinian, and Iraqi refugees, further increasing the presence of international researchers seeking to untangle networks of kinship, political economy, and access to health and education in forced exile. Indeed, regional displacements and disasters have centered Lebanon as a particularly generative location for research into crises, their histories, and their aftermaths. Building on this year’s meeting theme “Truth and Responsibility,” this roundtable explores the ways that the intersecting crises in Lebanon have altered anthropological orientations to ethnographic research. Participants will consider the ways that the needs, aspirations, and lived realities of our respective interlocutors•as well as our own positionalities•have changed or evolved in the context of Lebanon’s compounded disasters. What forms of justice and solidarity can anthropological research foster in the absence of accountability for ongoing economic breakdown and political repression? How can international anthropologists support and stand in solidarity with those primarily affiliated with Lebanese institutions? And how can insights about anthropological practice gained in Lebanon travel in a world witnessing an alarming rise in ecological disasters, xenophobic nationalist rhetoric, unbridled neoliberalization of educational institutions, and mass, involuntary migration?

Ethnography, Compounding Crises, and the World to Come: What Can Anthropology Learn from the Case of Lebanon?

Practicing anthropologists, at one time or another, have read the various codes of ethics published by organizations like the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA), and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). All of them are exemplary codes of ethics, but we ask, are they enough to help early-career anthropologists navigate the complexities of business?  To address this question, the session brings together a diverse group of practitioners from product management, user experience (UX), consumer research, marketing, and data science. Many of us have started our own practices while others work for organizations. Regardless of our backgrounds, we all have experiences where our semantic understanding of ethics bumped up against the realities of the job and our own needs to provide for ourselves and our families.  These experiences and how we navigated them is the basis of this roundtable. Each participant will discuss a case study in which they were unintentionally thrust into an ethical conundrum and will explain how they responded in the context of their professional practice. We will specifically cover what was the ethical issue, how did we try to address it, and what was the outcome.  As the audience will learn, sometimes we were successful in righting the injustice, even at the cost of the engagement, and sometimes we were not. Regardless of the outcome though, all of us believe that these experiences have helped us to navigate future ethical dilemmas, and while we do not condone any of the unethical practices that occurred, we appreciate the teaching value of our lived-experiences over only having a semantic understanding of the ethical codes.  To that end, we aim to honor the value of established ethics codes and final book chapters, but also to call attention to the real-world complexities of applying these texts to ethically challenging situations in practice, and to share with the audience experiences that can enliven their understanding of these texts.  The session is important because more students are going into the field as practicing anthropologists than ever before, and likewise, more anthropologists will be facing ethical issues as we have. Furthermore, given the rapid advancements in technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and genetics, many practitioners are going to be thrust into positions in which they will need to decide what role they wish to play in reshaping our economic systems and humanity.  There are new ethical challenges ahead of us, and though the tried and true ethical guidelines of the past will remain relevant as the basis of our understanding, we need to keep updating the conversations we have about applying these codes to the changing nature of business. Our careers depend on it, but most importantly, so do the people we ultimately represent.

Ethics Can’t be the Last Chapter

Ethnography as method and writing has been widely taken up by multidisciplinary scholars. However, there have been little multidisciplinary conversations on the messiness, discomforts, and challenges of designing, carrying out, and writing ethnographies. Yet, these challenges have profound effects on how we are able to carry out our fieldwork, engage with interlocutors, and write for diverse audiences. Building on scholarship that have reimagined ethnography through “translation” (de la Cadena 2015), “ethnographic refusal” (Simpson 2014), “suspending damage” (Tuck 2009), “ethnographic lettering” (Ralph 2020), “vulnerable observation” (Behar 1996), “affective archive” (Thomas 2019), and “patchwork ethnography” (Günel et al. 2020) this roundtable aims to create a space to discuss how ethnographers from different disciplines have navigated challenging relationships, conditions, and politics in their ethnographic research and writing. In doing so, we explore how and why fieldwork “breaks one’s heart” (Behar 1996) while, at times, itself becoming a source of danger, vulnerability, and precarity for the ethnographer in the midst. This roundtable explores how these challenges have shaped research and writing, and how they might help us further reimagine ethnography as more inclusive and equitable practice across disciplines. This roundtable includes scholars from diverse disciplines, including history, sociology, nursing, and anthropology that have used ethnographic methods for their research. The research range from Indigenous peasant resistance against the Shining Path in Peru, road safety and bodily risk in urban India, intergenerational trauma of genocide survivors in Rwanda, to health and well-being after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan. These research have engendered multiple challenges for ethnographers who have navigated the places and projects through their own embodied positionalities and resources, in order to produce research that is accountable not only to academic discussions but also to the communities they worked with. Together, presenters and participants will engage with and think through the following questions: What challenges did you face through your specific field site and positionality, and how did that affect the ways you designed, carried out, and wrote your research? How have diverse histories, epistemologies, and power relations factored into your practice, among ethnographers and interlocutors, ethnographic methods and other disciplinary methods, and divergent stakes in the communities and in the academy? Who are you writing for, where are you writing from, and how have you considered your responsibility towards your interlocutors? How have divergent stakes shaped your practices of writing, teaching, and community engagement? Ultimately, what are the ethnographic potentials that each work with and their limitations?

Difficult Encounters: Vulnerability and Precarity of Ethnography

The COVID-19 pandemic once again confronts us with the reality that health and illness are not neutral conditions but rather are produced through various institutions at multiple levels. Such productions happen locally and transnationally. The Coronavirus’ impact in Central American communities illustrates both of these points. In the United States, Central American migrants have been significantly affected due to residence in regional coronavirus hotspots (including California and New England) as well as their employment in high-risk sectors (including meat processing and restaurant work). In Central America, state responses to the pandemic have further marginalized already vulnerable populations. This roundtable explores the implications of anthropological truths and responsibilities in a variety of spaces, including the United States, Guatemala, and the virtual world of social media. Participants bring with them clinical and (auto)ethnographic insights. In the United States, we examine how undocumented status contributes to health inequities, interrogating how migration continues to be a key determinant of health (Castañeda et al. 2015; Holmes 2013; Kandula, Kersey, and Lurie 2004). In transnational, and often virtual spaces, we explore how Central American migrants use information communication technologies (ICTs) to not only communicate with family, but also help identify migrant acquaintances who are sick or have died. These uncomfortable realities and the unprecedented scale of the pandemic facilitate shifting and multiple truths that circulate locally and transnationally. Examination of social distancing practices, location of health services, vaccine availability, and press coverage in Guatemala demonstrate that Indigenous communities often bear the greatest burden. Using insights from both clinical and ethnographic perspectives, we examine the creative strategies that allow individuals, communities, and nongovernmental organizations to find new spaces for resilience. For example, we examine how community health workers use creative workarounds to continue to provide care despite the pandemic and we consider how families have recovered from quarantine, discrimination, disease, and loss in the aftermath of contagion. Finally, the roundtable examines anthropology’s role in the maintenance of “healthy” communities. Central America has long been the focus of the anthropological gaze. Early fascination with Mesoamerica’s ancient Maya and their living descendants helped to solidify a nascent academic discipline. Investigations of Central America continue to proliferate in the four academic sub-disciplines and their applied counterparts. This has prompted some to comment that the region has suffered from colonialism, anthropological attention (Wantanabe 1995), and increasingly the intervention of nongovernmental organizations and short-term medical missions (Berry 2014; Rohloff, Kraemer Díaz, and Dasgupta 2011). The connection between the United States and Central America continues to capture the imagination, but anthropologists are, more than ever, tasked with the responsibility to produce pragmatic and accessible knowledge. Our examination of the novel Coronavirus in Central American communities interrogates anthropology’s responsibility to the communities with whom it collaborates. How can we conduct ethnographic research that protects communities during the Coronavirus pandemic? How can we produce knowledge that will reduce stigma and inform equitable health initiatives?

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