In everyday life, government institutions engage in a wide variety of functions that can be described as providing ‘care’ to the populace. However, there is often a gap between the ‘rhetoric of care’ espoused by institutional spokespeople and the realities of how care functions in people’s everyday lives (Pinto 2014; Stevenson 2014; Biehl 2005), producing tensions of uncertainty, doubt, anxiety, anger, creativity, and even humor. Through diverse methods such as archival research, ethnographic encounters, and multimodal discourse analysis, our papers investigate this gap between institutional certainties and everyday doubts generated in the space of care. In both Canada and Peru, for example, there is a particularly stark contrast between government rhetoric on Indigenous relations and the lived realities of Indigenous peoples (Huayhua 2014; 2016; Niezen 2013; MacLachlan 2013). In medical and legal discourse there is often a discontinuity between the registers spoken by experts and by service recipients that can serve to increase distrust and anxiety at the expense of the effective distribution of care (Dumit 2012; Mol 2002; Conley and O’Barr 1998). Medical mechanisms of visibility, which try and often fail to produce knowable subjects must make repeated efforts to shore up certainty against the inevitable dissolution of diagnostic and narrative fact (Fleck 1979). While this work helps to create subjects that can be diagnosed, treated, and recorded, it often does so at the cost of silencing patient’s disorderly truths (Pinto 2014). Discourse analyses (Wortham, Reyes 2015) of political speech, like those produced during the COVID19 pandemic, reveals the ‘dissonant discourses’ used by government spokespeople, riddled with uncertainties and contradictions. Often these tensions get glossed over in discourse through the use of metaphor (Charteris-Black 2011; Lakoff 1991), leaving the public without a language for their everyday struggles. These tensions between institutionally produced facts and everyday uncertainties are diverse and instructive. Uncertainty can function as both a debilitating aporia (Derrida 1992; Bubandt 2014) and a creative force (Cooper, Pratten 2015). Using this lens, we note how an aura of institutional uncertainty underpins all of social life, constantly threatening dissolution (Boltanski 2011). However, we also examine how uncertainty is not just an inert atmosphere, it is also generated in contingent social relations (Whyte 2015; Berthomé et al 2012), in inscrutable relations of power (Bonhomme 2012; Allard 2012; Lepselter 2016), and even in hopeful and doubtful modes of practice (Whyte 2005; Cooper, Pratten 2015). At its core, this panel seeks to ask how people live their everyday lives in the shadow of uncertainty by way of institutional power (Foucault 1980) and how the analysis of institutional ‘truths’ in the delivery of care can provide both contiguities and disruptions in our attempt to understand intersecting dimensions of contemporary life including indigeneity, health, and justice.

Everyday Interaction and Care in a Southern Peruvian Clinic

The Tyranny of Care: Institutional Truths and Everyday Uncertainties

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.

Margarita Huayhua

1

1

Presentations

Everyday Interaction and Care in a Southern Peruvian Clinic

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES