United States

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Perspectives on Health and Wellbeing in East Asia: Fitness, Risk, and Suicide

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.

“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.

Despite labor laws that aim to provide better work-life balance, the increasing precarization of life•where a slowing neoliberal market intensifies skills needed for employability•finds many young South Korean adults not only confronting the impossibility of fulfilling a continuously displaced “good life” and the everyday forms of cruelty this optimism generates (Berlant 2011), but in a position where their biological life is at risk as self-blame continues to sustain the commonplace of suicide. But within such polarities, this paper concerns what comes of life for those Koreans who witness the suicide attempts of an intimate other in their residence, and in the silent aftermath of witnessing, how they negotiate life as the resonant hauntings of suicide consume the everyday security otherwise found in their fragile spatiotemporal construct of home. I propose this is aurally negotiated. By paying attention to how these suicidal hauntings in silence entangle with the precarious silencing of self in the chaotic noise of urban Seoul, I listen for how “silent” forms of sensing•subvocal humming, headphone listening, and stargazing•become employed as techniques of everyday survival and reprieve as the fragile repetitions of everyday life are rendered increasingly fraught (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). With these minor uses of inaudibility, I discern how these Koreans orient life to continuously exceed the foreboding self-subjectivization experienced in neoliberal Korea. Even amid the disorienting density of silence, I discern how these Koreans productively invoke and enact an unbridled becoming of life otherwise aurally limited through ideological and teleological framings (Grosz 2004, Jackson 2011).

Listening for Life: Silence, Resonant Hauntings, and the Reorientation of Aural Chaos among Suicide Witnesses in Neoliberal South Korea

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.

Collection, Collecting, Collector: Reimagining Anthropological Truth and Method

Archives in a Time of Fire: Orange County and the Invisible Worlds of Weed Abatement and Chaparral

Collections of Subjection: Girlhood and Carcerality in New Orleans

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

The Anti-Collection and Contemporary Archaeology

We are interested in discussing the relationship between health and spirituality, particularly the issue of the circulation of yoga, meditation and mindfulness practices in the field of complementary health therapies. At the beginning of the last century, Eastern spirituality, through the settling of several gurus and their disciples especially in Europe and Americas, was introduced to "Westerners" as a personal and experimental path, and a Western-reception environment incorporated these Eastern practices, forming a Western Spirituality. The 1960s and the counterculture, according to Collin Campbell and Peter van der Veer, came to strengthen these paths and influenced a change in the nature of religious discourse, related to a certain decline in devotion to the major, institutionalized transcendent religions, and also to the emergence of a renewal in religious discourse towards the spiritualities of immanence, beyond these institutions. These spiritualities have now been institutionalized and incorporated by another set of institutions. We intend to reflect on how spirituality was removed from religious systems and entered health systems, through the displacement of bodily practices of the self, originally associated with Eastern confessional traditions, to occupy a place of stress reduction therapy in a secular western medical environment. This operation seems to involve the suppression or at least the mitigation of the original confessional or devotional aspects of these practices which are then converted into therapeutic techniques associated with health and well-being. We suggest that this movement points to a psychologization of religious traditions and, at the same time, a spiritualization of the medical and psy fields.

Yoga and mindfulness: conversions and displacements between confessional practices and well-being techniques

Edward Said’s summation that “we live in a period of migration, of forced travel and forced residence, that has literally engulfed the globe” (Culture and Resistance 2003) is particularly apt with this panel. Some of the world’s highest levels of urbanization and socioeconomic inequalities are in the Middle East, which is also now a premier displacement region due to bilateral containment policies of externalization and national policies of refusing refugees from the region by European and North American governments. Displaced persons of all types and categories in this region typically prefer to settle in cities and towns. For refugees, this includes bypassing or leaving formal camps, thus further blurring the categories of “migrant,” “refugee,” "resident," "citizen," and • in the Middle East • temporary visitor or “guest.” On-going research on urban displaced in the region shows that settlement patterns are influenced by previous knowledge, kinship, social networks, religion/denomination preferences, and security considerations, as well as imaginaries of possibility and potential. Typically, Middle Eastern settlement processes are iterative, with multiple resettlements, which may render any individual visible or invisible, “guest” or “resident”, which is often based on political expediency. While cities offer economic opportunities, education, and access to other necessary municipal services, displacement crises often become protracted, thus defining the (im)possibilities for onward migration or voluntary repatriation. Long-term residence of displaced persons can strain local infrastructure, service provision, and social relations with host communities. What are the impacts of these demographic, economic, and socio- cultural changes posed by the urbanization movements of displaced persons on different forms and levels of governance? And what are the impacts of such shifts on the displaced persons' subjectivities? The papers in this panel address these questions through ethnographic research with displaced Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Syrians in major urban areas of five Middle Eastern countries • Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Sudan, and Afghanistan. The papers each take on major theoretical and empirical questions of visibility, mobility, labor and livelihoods, kinship and social networks, the governing bodies of civil society and (I)NGOs as well as bureaucratic policies that define the contours of possibility, and their impacts on subjectivities. While over the past decade academic research on displacement in the Middle East has often focused on refugee camps, the historiography of forced displacement and relief, and country specific studies of Middle East refugee crises, rarely have they had a specific urban focus or lens. This panel seeks to expand this scholarship and engage some of the most pressing questions of anthropology of migration in the urban Middle East.

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Listening for Life: Silence, Resonant Hauntings, and the Reorientation of Aural Chaos among Suicide Witnesses in Neoliberal South Korea