Collection, as both practice and principle, has long adjoined the work of anthropology. Gathering artifacts, tracking kinship networks, cataloging grammars, arraying myths: these concerns indicate the inherence of collection to each of the four fields. From Boasian “preservations” of indigenous cultures (Boas 1902) to the perspectival diversity of the “ontological turn” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), from the “reflexive” recovery of mystified ethnographic elements (Clifford and Marcus 1986) to recent multi-species and trans-human proliferations (Kohn 2013), collection in anthropology is ubiquitous and enduring. Anthropology’s compulsive will to knowledge, its concern with comprehensiveness and global coverage, its politics of certainty and organization: these aspects of anthropology’s own culture are illuminated through a consideration of collection. This panel takes up collection as a lens through which to view the anthropological enterprise and to revisit objects of anthropological concern. Addressing the theme of “truth and responsibility,” this panel asks how the act of collecting can shift understandings of anthropological responsibility, and how the premise of a collection produces or undermines an anthropological will to truth. Collection here undergirds anthropological work as a means to select, assemble, represent, and assert. A critical engagement with collection can, in this manner, challenge the concept of truth and humanistic calls for responsibility by complicating notions of inclusion and recognition in the first instance. This challenge comes amidst ongoing struggles in museum display (fought, for example, by the Decolonize This Place movement) as well as recent controversy in forensic anthropology (in the use of human remains from the 1985 MOVE police bombing). Our aim, however, is to see collection as a broader structure of anthropological thought and practice. Anthropologists have gestured toward collection in critiques of colonial sense-making (Simpson 2014), in theories of the archive (Riles 2008), and in museum studies (Karp and Levine 1991). This panel will centralize collection through a range of disciplinary positions, arguing for re-engagement with something fundamental but often overlooked.  Each presentation utilizes collection, collecting, or the collector to resituate topics of anthropological interest and thereby reposition the anthropological frame. How does mass media assert a collectionary power on reality, assembling truths reproductive of societal expectation? How does incarceration function as a state-sponsored act of collection, and what forms of resistance are adequate to this “collective” dynamic of the carceral institution? How does weed abatement reinforce modernity’s collection of regional biomes while entangling racialized workers and the chaparral itself? How do archeologists theorize the materiality of collection, and what impact does collection have on socially engaged research?  Boas, Franz. 1902. Kwakiutl Texts. New York: American Museum of Natural History.  Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.  Karp, Ivan, and Steven Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures. Washington: Smithsonian Press.  Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.  Riles, Annelise, ed. 2008. Documents. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP.  Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus. Durham, NC: Duke UP.

Journalist as Collector: A Dead Man's Wristwatch and the Assembly of Authoritative Truth

Collection, Collecting, Collector: Reimagining Anthropological Truth and Method

technical paper

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.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“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.

Isaac Blacksin

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Journalist as Collector: A Dead Man's Wristwatch and the Assembly of Authoritative Truth

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