United States

This research focused on the construction of social life among young gay men who use the location-based social networking application, Grindr. The purpose of this research was to examine the ways in which Grindr affects the lives of the men who use it. This study employed ethnographic methods for data collection including participant observation, in-depth interviews and ethnographic survey. This research intended to capture lived experiences without a prearranged focus on any specific topic (i.e. politics, economics, sexuality etc.), however, a thematic analysis emergent themes included consumerism, gender, and identity. These results were analyzed and contextualized.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Networks, Technology, and The Politics of Everyday Lived Worlds

queer

technology

social media

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

In 1886,a technical gazetteer on Tibetan lands, Tukao of Tibet, was published by a Chinese official stationed in a western Chinese province adjacent to the Tibetan lands. The gazetteer reveals a Chinese community exchanging ideas, conversations, maps and techniques. More than the emergence of an ethno-science on geography, it forces us to re-think the knowledge community. The boundary-work challenges a Kuhnian idea of knowledge community. The boundary can be traced in concrete tasks: 1, who can legitimately speak on gazetteers? 2, how can this knowledge be articulated (Hacking, 1992)? The self-evident categories of amateurs / experts and scientists/ non-scientists break down in Tukao. Poets and surveyors paralleled, officials and trivial merchants juxtaposed; their heterogeneous articulations were displayed. The imperial Chinese gazetteer offers a space for exhibiting, and another way of assembling the knowledge community.

Exhibition as a form of knowledge: gazetteers & communal network in 19th century China

“It’s about the everyday and just supporting people to live ordinary lives, which should be everybody's right.” Jenny, the coordinator of St Hilda’s East Food Co-op told me as we discussed the politics of the East London project. While she recognized that this was political, she also saw it as very local, questioning the role of acts such as helping people with their grocery shopping in a wider “transformation of power”. But what constitutes political action? Where is it situated and at what scale? While the bold politics of mass social movements, social justice campaigning work and overt forms of direct action are often easily legible as political, the comparatively mundane actions taking place within the context of community projects can be seen in more ambivalent terms as Jenny’s words attest. Due to their everydayness, many forms of community organizing are under-recognized as urban activism, even among their participants • who often include larger numbers of women and minoritized communities (Jupp 2012). This limits the truths that come to be told about the nature of political action, and the kinds of people who are involved. Drawing on feminist and anarchist perceptions of the political, which are attentive to the practices of care (Tronto 1993) and collective responsibility (Kropotkin 1902) often fostered within community projects, this paper seeks to reframe understandings of the political by exploring the mundane and everyday forms of political action apparent within two London-based, grassroots, retail food co-ops • St Hilda’s East and Fareshares.

Ordinary lives and everyday actions: Reframing the political within community projects

This is Panel I of a double panel exploring novel and emerging engagements with excrement, defecation, manure, sewage, and other shit. Panelists draw upon ethnographic material to analyze diverse enactments, representations, and encounters with shit, grappling with its dangers and its promises across scales at once global and local. We take inspiration from Laporte’s History of Shit (1978), which argued that the management of shit has been synonymous with the rise of modern Western subjectivity and the concomitant ascent of optical power. This panel asks what happens if we follow these insights while also opening shit up to show the diverse contests and interpretations around its production and disposal in the contemporary moment. Panel I reconsiders the central role of sanitation campaigns, sewage infrastructures, hygiene panics, and waste management in neo/colonial governance and biopolitical projects. Scholars have long argued that while asymmetrical sanitation infrastructures reflect structural inequalities, discourse around hygiene and sanitation have also been central to larger civilizing projects, used both to justify expanding imperialism and to instill capitalist disciplinary regimes in which desires for cleanliness fuel ever growing commodity consumption. Panel I tackles this problematic across five diverse sites, including: the appeal of shit voyeurism in U.S. media portrayals of disease in Africa; the political semiotics of citizen protests over a manure storage facility in rural USA; everyday sanitation-related labor and a spectacular politics of shit in post-apartheid South Africa; fecal disciplining by the Thai monarchy to instill an occularcentric visual regime in rural lifeworlds; and privately-owned public toilets that enact aspirations for upward class mobility in Ghana. Additionally, our panels aim to engage•and move beyond•classic anthropological approaches to excrement, shit, defecation, manure, and sewage. We take up Mary Douglas’ classic account of “dirt as matter out of place”•an approach she also applied to bodily processes like defecation•by exploring how shit disrupts the established ordering of the world, hence its deployment in both contemporary political discourse and forms of political resistance. However, we also question the framing of shit as universally pejorative as we explore its many modes of manipulation, deployment, and even consumption in the contemporary world. Panel II takes up this ambivalence and complexity across five additional contexts, including: the fecundity of shit to inspire critiques of "development" in Kenya and DR Congo; the collection of cow dung by Dalit women in India for whom sacred shit conjoins with struggles over land rights; dream interpretations that equate excrement with money in and beyond rural Mexico; excremental attunements to phantom colons following J-pouch surgeries in the US; and Southeast Asian and North American cabin crews who engage aircraft lavatories as culturally generative devices. These multivalent engagements with shit are considered across several different registers•spatial, mnemonic, psychoanalytic, visual, somatic, historical, interpretive, material, political, and semiotic•as panelists grapple with the complexity, ambivalence, and contradictions that shit entails as it comes to matter in diverse ways across particular lifeworlds. Our provocation and invitation is to take shit seriously, politically and conceptually, in the making of modern power, subjection, and subjectivity.

Multivalent Shit: New Directions in the Anthropology of Excrement, Defecation, and Manure (Panel I of II)

Behind Phantom Walls: Politics of Shit and the Thai Regime of Visibility

Biosolids, Manure, Poop: The Semiotics of "Green" Energy in the Rural Midwest

Excremental Excess: Infrastructures of Abjection and Upward Mobility in Urban Ghana

Shit Targets and Shit Voyeurism: Rendering Antibiotic Use in Africa

The Politics of Shit and Shitty Politics: Mundane Infrastructure and Everyday Activism in the Era of Spectacular Shit

This roundtable brings together anthropologists whose work seeks to explore how political engagements and critical approaches to knowledge production can animate multimodal anthropologies. We are particularly excited to convene in St. Louis to directly engage the program committees provocation to reimagine our discipline as one where we act on the imperative to “bear witness, take action, and be accountable.” Drawing on multimodal methodologies the convened scholars ground these critical questions in their work with Indigenous youth activists in rural Mexico, migrant artists in urban United States, activism in favor of non-human animals along the U.S.-Mexico border, heritage conservation and disaster management in the Philippines, anarchist punks in Indonesia, and rural health inequalities in the U.S. and Canada. Through ethnographic film, digital ethnography labs, photography, collaborative methodologies, the authors in this roundtable will grapple with questions surrounding the limits and possibilities of multimodal anthropologies and, indeed, of the anthropological imagination itself. Echoing Samuel Gerald Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill’s (2017) commitment to multimodality in research, practice, and dissemination of scholarship, this roundtable accepts their “invitation to join in and be part of the multimodal movement” that will shape the discipline’s future. In order to truly be transformative for the discipline and not simply a passing fad or methodological afterthought, we believe that multimodality must be fueled by critical self-reflectivity, political commitment and action. In doing so, we commit to doing the work that the 2020 program committee’s call to action requires of us to reckon with the discipline’s dual histories of settler-colonialism and slavery. How might decolonial, anti-racist social movements push anthropology into a future where we both reckon with our disciplinary inheritance and create a more liberatory, committed, and accountable anthropology? How does multimodality open up possibilities for more equitable collaborative practice? How does multimodality create space for anthropology to embrace the uncertain and at time messy process and product of anthropology•ethnography (Varzi 2018).

Multimodal Ethnography as Method for Staying True to Political Engagements and Critical Epistemologies

Amidst a widening global wealth gap where racial orders of mobility come into stark view, minoritized individuals strive toward a materially and socially “better” life. Anthropologists and allied scholars explore the rise of new middle classes that include individuals historically marginalized by race (Coe and Pauli 2020, Klein et al. 2018, Shakow 2014, Vallejo 2012). Celebratory accounts of such apparent economic mobility suggest that it may lead to the softening of racial and class prejudices, enabling meaningful social mobility, inclusion, and the chance to join the ranks of those living the good life. Our existing frameworks frequently characterize these yearning efforts at class mobility as incarnations of “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), whereby hopeful strivers unwittingly pursue fantasies of the good life that ultimately do them harm. Alternatively, such efforts are examined as acts of transformative aspiration (Appadurai 2013) and “becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2017) that suggest the development of new subjectivities and possibilities beyond present social orders (James 2019). Moreover, these studies of rising middle classes’ yearnings coincide with scholarly concern around how minoritized/marginalized individuals cope with “new” forms of precarity arising from the collapse of Fordist labor regimes and the rise of micro-entrepreneurship and anti-poverty efforts that, ironically, lead to increased poverty (Hardon et al. 2019, Kar 2018, Muehlebach 2011). Emphasizing contemporary modes of precarity, and how people make do, runs the risk of ignoring long-standing racialized orders of capitalism and colonialism that have always constrained minoritized populations’ mobilities, but not their dreams of the good life (Castellanos 2020; Millar 2017; Weston 2012).  This panel pushes our collective anthropological imaginations to reconceptualize class mobility as racialized. We do so to better understand how people made marginal by race and class define and fashion a good life and self in material, relational, and moral registers (Fischer 2014, Gregory and Altman 2018). Toward this aim, we think with our varied interlocutors’ sensemaking of the intersecting gendered, raced, and classed structural inequalities that shape their chances of class mobility as well as their perceptions of their own mobility’s possibilities. Accordingly, this panel grapples with the following questions: How are modes of entrepreneurship, financial inclusion, financial ruin, and white collar work themselves racialized and imbricated with moralized perceptions of the valued minority person that circulate locally and globally? How are these orders of racialization altered or anchored by individuals’ movement into or out of a ‘new’ minoritized middle class? How are our interlocutors theorizing their own experiences of racial and class-based marginalization or belonging? How do they conceptualize the good life to which they aspire--including the material evidence of their triumphant successes or painful failings? At the heart of this panel, and our individual projects, is attention to the intersecting modalities of power and privilege asserted and re-worked amid struggles over racialized class mobility. This panel seeks to work against the epistemological violence that can occur in academic research and writing by centering the sense-making practices of our interlocutors as co-theorists of their own experiences of racial and class-based marginalization and mobility.

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Networks, Technology, and The Politics of Everyday Lived Worlds

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