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?

Oil Fires and Local Futures: Responsibility and Community on an Indian Petro-frontier

A Mundane Cosmopolitics for the Anthropocene

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.

Tanmoy Sharma

1

1

Presentations

Oil Fires and Local Futures: Responsibility and Community on an Indian Petro-frontier

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES