United States

Im/mobility regimes refer to the political-economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced or permitted to move and to migrate (Brandhorst, Baldassar, and Wilding 2020; Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013). This panel examines how im/mobility regimes relate to lived experiences of aging around the world. Additionally, this panel grapples with how a focus on age and aging may enhance understanding of im/mobilities. Investigating im/mobility regimes destabilizes assumptions about mobility in old age. While old age is often associated with stasis and decline, the world’s population is increasingly growing up and growing older in contexts of migration. Older adults engage in return and retirement migration; they are refugees, displaced by violence and environmental change; and they actively participate in transnational families, even when they do not migrate themselves. Yet, it would be equally problematic to associate mobility in old age with freedom (Salazar and Smart 2011). Anthropological research suggests that migration often reproduces the social, political, and economic inequalities that shape differential aging experiences and undergird the need to migrate (Coe 2017; Yarris 2014), even as older adults and their families creatively adapt to migratory contexts (Ahlin 2018; Lamb 2009). How do we reconcile this tension between creative agency and inequality in aging, as foregrounded by im/mobility regimes? This panel brings together research on aging and migration in diverse contexts, including eldercare in transnational families, international retirement migration, repeated migration throughout the life course, and migrations to elderhood. Together, the papers in this panel theorize relationships among mobilities, immobilities, and aging.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

With their eyes to the West: (Im)mobility regimes and intergenerational care in Indian transnational families

immigration/migration

aging and life course

mobility

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

COVID-19 has unmasked the ways that chronological age--and especially old age--has become a lethal marker of otherness in both lay and medical discourses. This panel aims to contextualize the current intersections of age and crisis in the longstanding, if banal, ways that age and aging have marked forms of otherness across time and place. Recognizing that practices of age-based othering can be both (and sometimes simultaneously) lethal and generative, we ask how such practices are linked to the ways life and lives come to be valued. How have various forms of expert knowledge, including anthropology, participated in constructions of aged others, and with what consequences? While old age has drawn most of the attention around these issues, this panel explores how age marks value and otherness across the lifecourse, for example, in the ways that youth come to be marked as dangerous or transgressive, or that people with disabilities come to be treated as child-like. The papers on this panel examine how age intersects with other forms of difference, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and ability, and investigate how such forms of difference relate to sociocultural and political-economic forms of inequality. In the first paper, Buch and Robbins explore how enduring distinctions between “the West” and “the rest” shape anthropological research on aging, and how these distinctions obscure links between age and power in the ethnographic record. In the second paper, Thomason examines how age has become a source of critique of rural Chinese grandparent care in ways that reveal the hegemony of nuclear family ideals. In the third paper, Grace demonstrates that Ecuadorian assumptions of equivalence between student and youth identities are belied by gendered practices of familial care, leading to unequal gendered forms of citizenship. In the fourth paper, Wright describes a medical treatment to show that practices that conceive of people with disabilities as living in non-normative temporalities produce unequal forms of personhood even when they aim to promote inclusion. In the fifth paper, Valente draws upon a case study of a Brazilian youth upon his eighteenth birthday to show how age demarcates persons seen as deserving care versus punishment in relation to criminal justice. This panel contends that age plays an undertheorized role in the structuring of power and inequality across social worlds. Collectively, these papers ask how age categories participate in the generation of valued life and lives, so that anthropology can better account for the intertwined workings of age and power.

Age, Difference, and the Other: Making Value through Life Course Categories

“I Was Stealing Her Childhood”: Girls Becoming Citizens in Ecuadorian High Schools

Age, Ability and Personhood in Disabled Lives

Anthropology and Its Elder Other

Grandparents, Grandchildren, and Generations of Difference: Age as Liability in the Rural Chinese Family

Turning of Age and Criminality in an NGO in Brazil

Within museums, archives, and libraries, there is increasing interrogation of established knowledge structures and their power to represent. Presenters in this Roundtable will share our experiences, frustrations, and aspirations working with the data systems surrounding institutionalized cultural collections as stewards and researchers. With the audience, we will begin a conversation exploring interest and direction for a collaborative survey of Collections Management Systems built for/with/around Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and values of knowledge sovereignty. The organizers approach this topic through our positionality as professionals of European settler and immigrant colonial heritage working with global collections of tangible and intangible culture. We believe a comparative survey could help decolonize broader museum and archival praxes by defining lessons from community-centered knowledge stewardship relevant to universalist CMS’s (for example, based on Library of Congress, Museum Nomenclature, Getty, and other controlled schema). There has been a vibrant proliferation of community-led initiatives in the space of IKS, both using open-source platforms (exp., Mukurtu, GRASAC GKS, Keeping Culture KMS) and bespoke systems (exp., Sqewlets Website Project). A synthetic understanding of these methods, data structures, values, and outcomes could clarify common strategies and improve critical data practices in both colonially- and community-held collections. This conversation builds on the American Alliance of Museums' 2018 report Words Matter: Lexicon Usage and Indigenous Cultural Belongings and other recent critical studies in the field.

A Conversation on Community-led Databases: Surveying Methods of Knowledge Sovereignty

This conversation provides an anthropological analysis of life narratives and sinuous legal trajectories of Afghan refugees on the move across Europe. It is based on first-hand ethnographic observations, gathered during two field trips to Calais (France) and to the Chios and Lesvos islands (Greece), conducted by Nataliya Tchermalykh and Alexander Ephrussi in May-August 2021. Based on several months of intense fieldwork, our conversation will provide snapshots of Afghan lives, as they move through states and continents. Navigating within the nets of local and global infrastructures of humanitarian aid, this conversation will illustrate how refugees negotiate their passage with different individuals - NGO-workers, lawyers, local populations, as well as the agents of law enforcement, cost guards, and asylum case-workers, enforcing the European borders on earth, on sea, and on paper. In late summer 2021, while the Taliban troops were advancing across Afghanistan at an unprecedented pace, we were documenting the everyday lives of Afghan refugees on the remote Greek islands (Chios and Lesvos), under a constant threat of the most dreadful forest fires in Greek history. Focusing specifically on the access to justice of refugee populations, we gathered their life narratives, opinions and accounts of the recent epidemiological and geopolitical emergencies, such as COVID-19 pandemics, Brexit, recent Franco-British and Greco-Turkish intergovernmental tensions and decisions, as well as the withdrawal of the American troops from Afghanistan. These emergencies directly affected the lives of the inhabitants of the camps and their alentours and added to the fragmentation of the already complex social fabric of the refugee lives across Europe. We left our last field site on the 15th of August - the day when the Taliban took control of Kabul. By laying the focus on social and legal trajectories of Afghan migrants across and beyond Europe, the aim of this conversation is to come to a deeper understanding of the dynamic relationship between the life narratives, the law and the space, as it is configured in European border zones, while shedding light, however indirectly, to the ongoing situation in Afghanistan. Nataliya Tchermalykh is a legal anthropologist, studying the imaginaries of law and justice in different parts of Europe, with a particular focus on the work of legal professionals, acting as interfaces between the states, the supra-state entities and the vulnerable populations. Alexander Ephrussi is a social anthropologist and a German-English-Dari translator, specializing in recent Afghan diasporas in Europe.

Afghan lives in European refugee camps: life narratives, law(lesness), and hopes for justice. A conversation between Nataliya Tchermalykh and Alexander Ephrussi

Deep-seated colonial and racist roots undergird the field of anthropology as a whole and biological anthropology in particular. Once replete with notions of eugenics, typologies, assimilation, and racial hierarchies, the field has evolved, and reflexive trends have challenged researchers and practitioners to confront these oppressive ideologies. When turning the ethnographic gaze upon ourselves, we ask, how do we as professionals continue to reproduce inequity, inequality, and violence within our own discipline--and how can we avoid this? This session focuses on anthropology’s professional responsibility to our own field and our colleagues, as well as how diversity and inclusion can improve our professional practice.  This roundtable is inspired by several timely events. Following a unilateral decision made by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) in 2020 to disband the Anthropology Section’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, forensic anthropologists erupted in animated and contentious dialogue regarding the merit, need, objectives, and vision of diversity and inclusion for biological anthropologists. Concurrently, a letter to the editor of the Journal of Forensic Sciences (Bethard & DiGangi 2020) and a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (DiGangi & Bethard 2021) called for the dismantling of forensic notions of “ancestry,” as it perpetuates the disproven biological race concept that persists in American culture, among enacting other harms. Additionally, numerous events throughout the year have highlighted persistent issues around the care of human remains, along with the human rights laws (i.e., NAGPRA) and ethics which supposedly protect them. However, it is clear that such abuses and indifference to--or chastisement of--the responses they provoke continue to signal to under-represented scholars that they are unwelcome. Given that biological anthropologists are first anthropologists, and issues surrounding diversity and antiracism are also being confronted by sociocultural anthropologists, primatologists linguists, and archaeologists, this conversation creates a space for anthropologists across subdisciplines to bridge professional organizations, efforts, and specializations to effect change across the field as a whole. In particular, we will interrogate two pressing questions: 1) what is Anthropology’s professional responsibility to inclusivity, antiracism,and anti-oppression within the field?; and 2) how can relationships between the subfields be leveraged to produce actionable, substantive change across the discipline?

What is Anthropology’s Professional Responsibility to Anti-Oppression Action and Inclusion within the Field?

This session looks at an experience familiar to anthropologists: the unfinished project. Work we have yet to complete often weighs on our mind, because we intended to complete the task but were ultimately defeated by time, by other responsibilities, by forces beyond our control. Indeed, the reasons a project are left unfinished may differ, depending on the stage of our careers, on the priorities in anthropology at the time, or by a host of other reasons. Now as we consider our commitments and inclinations going forward, what role should completion of these projects take in the absorption of our limited time? The papers in this session consider such unfinished business. This may have been in a long-term field-site research or perhaps in a newly started project we had to leave for a while and always meant to return to. It could be ethnographic, conceptual, analytical • or a combination thereof, a manuscript half-finished that was abandoned for some reason now forgotten or a particular piece of research only half done. Such unfinished business preys on our conscience, because it was never written up, or it was dropped for reasons long forgotten, or was almost finished but put aside, perhaps temporarily, when circumstances forced us to move onto something else. This session offers the opportunity, in a relatively formal setting, to examine the whys and wherefores of this very common issue, to revisit the project itself, and possibly to provide the impetus for suggesting various ways of completing it.

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