United States

The Punjabi popular music industry recently produced a spate of songs on the joys and difficulties of trucking in North America. While English-language news media in North America breathlessly details this seeming novelty as the number of Punjabi-Americans in the trucking industry swells, many Punjabi popular songs from prior decades mourn the sorrows of the domestic long-haul trucker, who is portrayed as an overlibidinal and untrustworthy beast of burden. In further contrast, other contemporary songs valorize the rootedness of local agriculturalists and their powerful tractors, portrayed in opposition to those who emigrate. Why have such conflicting portrayals of mobility achieved public prominence through Punjabi music?  This paper details how spatialized differences in the valuation of goods and labor across cities, states, and nations drive people to move. I analyze how Punjabi popular songs are shaped by patterns of mobility, and how these songs value (or devalue) such mobilities. Logistics • the calculation and management of the motion of goods and people through space and time • structures supply chains, the lives of those who labor in supply chains, and public culture. Media underpinning contemporary logistical practices, which range from digital platforms to cell phones to trucks, shape Punjabi popular media industries. The prominence of logistics in Punjabi popular media, whether on truck or tractor, makes it an appropriate vantage point for investigating the cultural life of supply chains.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Singing the Supply Chain: Punjabi Tractor Songs, Truck Songs, and Media of Global Mobility

ethnomusicology

mobility

value

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.

technical paper

The 2021 conference theme of Truth and Responsibility is not novel for Indigenous and allied scholars whose decolonial work has long called out ways anthropological research serves settler colonial continuance of Indigenous erasure, ongoing inequities, and structural violence (Simpson, 2017; Patel, 2016). Indigenous and decolonial studies have a history of proposing paradigmatic and conceptual shifts about how, with whom, and for what purpose research and knowledge production are engaged (Denzin et al., 2008; Brayboy et al., 2012; Ranco, 2006; Smith, 2012); these calls are even more timely as the COVID19 pandemic amplifies a landscape of deeply rooted and grave inequities in the treatment of Indigenous and other minoritized peoples across institutional structures and through narratives build on colonial unknowing. While the act of questioning institutionalized settler colonialism in research on human behavior, language, and cultural worlds is not new for Indigenous and decolonial social science research, institutional acceptance of Indigenous and decolonial research methods as legitimate forms of rigorous intellectual inquiry for the public good have not experienced wide reception (Sumida Huaman & Mataira, 2019). This session is predicated on a belief that institutions commit to engaging Indigenous and decolonial methodologies, with respect and material accountability, in ways that dismantle the “guest paradigm” that maintains Indigenous peoples struggle for social and restorative justice in the margins (Morgan, 2019). We forefront Indigenous peoples’ rights to participate and transform the anthropological present and future agenda which is “defined and constructed by” the dominant membership. Session papers advocate for an agenda beyond the perception of equity as “sameness,” and move toward an agenda premised in the notion of “uncompromised veracity of unceded sovereignty” (Morgan, 2019, 126). This oral presentation session put forth by standing committee #7 in the Council for Anthropology and Education illuminates the gifts of Indigenous and decolonial scholarship as paradigms to that support human diversity of knowing in higher education. Papers highlight a continued tradition among Indigenous and decolonial scholars to speak truth to settler colonial hegemony, to engage in scholarship that contributes to epistemological diversity in equitable ways, and to celebrate the transformative potential of community-academic partnerships that engage the vibrancy of Indigenous and decolonizing thought (Parker et al., 2017). The collective research featured in this session showcases new and emerging scholar-educators who are. mapping new possibilities for social inquiry in education while making the road as they walk it. Questions we ask/address: How do Indigenous and de-colonial scholar-educators: • Hold anthropology accountable through truth telling from multiple locations? • Grapple with doing the double work of mapping their own historically- and geographically-located epistemologies and ontologies while also being made to explain scholarship in ways intelligible to the academy? • Reimagine anthropology toward greater respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and accountability to Indigenous place, ontologies, and epistemologies? • Push against the tensions of technocratic and universalizing agendas through work that centers historically- and geographically-located epistemologies and ontologies?

Responsibility and Truth-Telling: Indigenous and Decolonial Scholarship in Higher Education

Campus Climate Change: Decolonization and Rematriation

Decolonizing Urban American Indian Institutions: Indigenous Practical Authority in Boise, Idaho

Grounded in Relationships: Master-Novice Teacher Mentorship for Desettling Public Schooling

Istemlis ee stim-El-ees (My Relatives - Salish)

Learning From Indigenous Conceptions of Mapping and Place: Spatial Analysis of Land and Water

Mapping the intersections of culturally responsive pedagogy, critical consciousness and educator praxis in Tribal Public Schools

Over the past sixty years a great deal of knowledge about every kind of cataclysm and the risks leading to them has been acquired through systematic research to which disaster anthropologists have contributed a great deal. Illuminated have been the causes of mishaps, the horrors yet commonalities within events, and the many quagmires of recovery. Since the beginning of 2020, the entire world has been engulfed a profound global calamity that has affected people of every nation, race, gender, and social class. What has unfolded during the coronavirus pandemic is not unique, quite the opposite. It has involved a pattern of features present in virtually every sort of disaster: issues of risk perception, vulnerability, chronology, disparity, division, politics, economics, governance, law, unity, contestation, religion, symbolism, and subsistence. Most of all, it has functioned as with other disasters as a revealer. Here, manifested have been issues of systemic structure and the hidden outgrowths of certain human pursuits, ranging from social to material, polity, and environmental Many of which have continued as vaccines distribution has begun. At this round table a set of expert anthropologists from the field of disaster studies discuss and analyze the many facets of the COVID 19 pandemic

Knowing Better, Losing Even More: The 2020 Corona Virus Pandemic in Anthropological Perspective as Discussed by a Panel of Risk Disaster Anthropologist Experts

The Association of Black Anthropologists was founded in 1970 by a small group of intellectuals who sought to break down barriers that impeded their full participation in the discipline of Anthropology. By creating scholarship that linked anthropological theory to struggles for social justice, these elders transformed anthropology and helped create generations of intellectual leaders. Since its beginnings, first as the Minority Caucus, and later as the Caucus of Black Anthropologists and the Association of Third World Anthropologists, ABA has sought to ensure, and has challenged the discipline and all other sections to act upon the understanding that the people with whom anthropologists work are not objects of study but active makers and/or participants in their own history. In a larger sense, we highlight situations of exploitation, oppression and discrimination. Further it is and has been our objective to analyze and critique social science theories that misrepresent the reality of exploited groups while at the same time constructing more adequate theories to interpret the dynamics of oppression. For the past fifty years, we have been committed to the participation of students of anthropology, recruiting Black graduate and undergraduate students, enrolling them into the ABA and mentoring students involved in ABA. We have been active participants in the direction and leadership of the AAA and other sections, and contributed scholarly insights through our flagship journal Transforming Anthropology, as well as serving as the editors, contributing editors, and reviewers for many other journals within anthropology and the social sciences. We have produced award winning books, held top positions at universities, foundations, and nonprofits. We have impacted policy and been at the forefront of some of the most important public facing scholarship of our time. Using this session to hear from our leaders both past and present, we take this opportunity to think on and reflect upon our impact up to and through now and to set our vision and charge for the future.

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Singing the Supply Chain: Punjabi Tractor Songs, Truck Songs, and Media of Global Mobility

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Responsibility and Truth-Telling: Indigenous and Decolonial Scholarship in Higher Education

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