United States

Taxonomies are powerful ordering techniques, material-semiotic devices of inclusion and exclusion, and discourses that do not merely describe the material world but constantly remake it. They have long been critical for the development of the modern life sciences (Leigh Star, 1989; Helmreich, 2005). In response to hegemonic claims that scientific taxonomies reveal the intrinsic order in nature, critical scholars of the life sciences have argued that taxonomic concepts, such as species, impose an order on life that does not inherently exist. Other scholars•in both the social and life sciences•have countered that organisms beyond humans recognize different kinds of beings, thereby engaging in classificatory practices themselves (Kirksey 2015). This suggests that a wide range of “existents” (Povinelli, 2016) practice their own taxonomies. This debate leads us to rethink not just the histories of classificatory practices but, more broadly, humans’ and nonhumans’ roles in the making and perpetuation of taxonomies. Anthropologists have closely scrutinized how people around the world have been subjected to taxonomies, but paid scarce attention to taxonomies of the nonhuman, the inhuman, the more-than-human, the transhuman, and other existents. Recognizing these raises new questions, and possibilities, for understanding taxa and other ordering techniques. How do different existents order the world today? How do they bring older forms of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and unbelonging, into question? What tools do anthropologists have to study the taxonomic practices of humans and/or nonhumans? What are the challenges and possibilities of studying them today, when the boundaries among subjects and objects, bios and geos, are ever more opaque? How should we engage them? These are crucial questions as we try to make sense of the social/material world around us today. In this panel, we seek to bring together papers that examine taxonomies of substances such as chemicals, metals and rocks; taxonomies of energy, space, time; taxonomies that unite the organic and the inorganic, bios and geos, and otherwise assemble the human and the nonhuman. References: Helmreich, Stefan. 2005. How scientists think; about ‘natives’, for example. A problem of taxonomy among biologists of alien species in Hawaii. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11(1):107-128. Kirksey, Eben. 2015. Species: A Praxiographic Study. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(4): 758-780. Leigh Star, S., &amp; Griesemer, J. R. 1989. Institutional ecology, translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3):387-420. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Taxonomies of the present

science & technology studies

environment

theory

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.

Taxonomies are powerful ordering techniques, material-semiotic devices of inclusion and exclusion, and discourses that do not merely describe the material world but constantly remake it. They have long been critical for the development of the modern life sciences (Leigh Star, 1989; Helmreich, 2005). In response to hegemonic claims that scientific taxonomies reveal the intrinsic order in nature, critical scholars of the life sciences have argued that taxonomic concepts, such as species, impose an order on life that does not inherently exist. Other scholars•in both the social and life sciences•have countered that organisms beyond humans recognize different kinds of beings, thereby engaging in classificatory practices themselves (Kirksey 2015). This suggests that a wide range of “existents” (Povinelli, 2016) practice their own taxonomies. This debate leads us to rethink not just the histories of classificatory practices but, more broadly, humans’ and nonhumans’ roles in the making and perpetuation of taxonomies. Anthropologists have closely scrutinized how people around the world have been subjected to taxonomies, but paid scarce attention to taxonomies of the nonhuman, the inhuman, the more-than-human, the transhuman, and other existents. Recognizing these raises new questions, and possibilities, for understanding taxa and other ordering techniques. How do different existents order the world today? How do they bring older forms of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and unbelonging, into question? What tools do anthropologists have to study the taxonomic practices of humans and/or nonhumans? What are the challenges and possibilities of studying them today, when the boundaries among subjects and objects, bios and geos, are ever more opaque? How should we engage them? These are crucial questions as we try to make sense of the social/material world around us today. In this panel, we seek to bring together papers that examine taxonomies of substances such as chemicals, metals and rocks; taxonomies of energy, space, time; taxonomies that unite the organic and the inorganic, bios and geos, and otherwise assemble the human and the nonhuman. References: Helmreich, Stefan. 2005. How scientists think; about ‘natives’, for example. A problem of taxonomy among biologists of alien species in Hawaii. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11(1):107-128. Kirksey, Eben. 2015. Species: A Praxiographic Study. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(4): 758-780. Leigh Star, S., & Griesemer, J. R. 1989. Institutional ecology, translations’ and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3):387-420. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press.

technical paper

Emergent Subterranean Taxonomies in the Yucatan Peninsula

Flea Choice: Nonhuman Taxonomies and Plague Relationships

Impoverished Multispecies Worlds: Reparative Knowledge Practices in Emergent Aquatic Ecosystems

The Inorganic Slot

The Taxon and the Beast: The Making of a Dinosaur's Vicious Nature

What is a Ravine? Social Taxonomies of the Multiform in Guatemala City

What “truths” are American Indian anthropologists finding in the discipline well into the 21st century? How do those truths remedy centuries of misrepresentation? This Roundtable of practicing American Indian anthropologists will speak truth to anthropology from diverse experiences and perspectives. Native North America was exceedingly diverse prior to European incursion of the “new world.” Indigenous peoples comprised more than seven million inhabitants north of Mexico, reflecting hundreds of ethnicities speaking over 300 languages and practicing scores of spiritual traditions. Despite some higher-order commonalities among these peoples•e.g., widespread stewardship of and devotion to sacred non-human persons for long and prosperous lives, profound orientation to space and place within regional ecologies, robust relationality as a primary mode of engagement in the world•it was the colonial encounter with Europeans and (later) Euro-Americans that ultimately stamped the generic label “American Indian” into existence. Along with it, colonization enforced familiar policies and practices of subjugation such as land appropriation, resource extraction, population control, and coercive assimilation. This subjugation collectively served to forge commonalities in experience, expectation, and outlook among formerly disparate indigenous peoples. Early anthropologists, of course, played their role in representing American Indians for the rest of the world, and their dedication to salvage anthropology ignored in important respects the adaptability of Native communities even as it amplified associations of Native peoples with primitivity and imperialist nostalgia. Critiques of anthropological history with respect to the discipline’s exploitative entanglements with American Indians have long since arisen, but less visible or acknowledged is the place that contemporary American Indian people have found in anthropology to reimagine the field in ways that meet present and pressing demands throughout “Indian Country.” Thus, American Indian anthropologists today seek to convey truths from alternative vantage points, whether refracted through lenses of indigeneity, gender, sexuality, social class, and various intersections of these. These truths contest and contend with supposed knowledge about indigenous peoples that seems to circulate endemically throughout the USA, and the broader world. For this Roundtable, we convene eight American Indian anthropologists•who themselves represent diversity in gender, tribal affiliation, subfield specialization, and career stage•to describe their efforts to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable for the work they contribute to and through the discipline. Common themes of these presentations will include innovative professional efforts to render anthropology relevant for American Indian people today, thorny challenges associated with balancing accountability to both tribal communities and the discipline more broadly, and determined efforts to unsettle the harmful legacies of settler colonialism that continue to haunt Indian Country. The resulting conversation will affirm the primacy of truth and responsibility for American Indian anthropologists as the twin foundations of their professional practice and personal relationships. NOTE: We invited a senior American Indian anthropologist, Professor Jennie Joe (Dine), to serve as our session Discussant. She was willing, but encountered trouble confirming her participation (and AAA website support could not assist her in time). If selected for the program, we hope that Dr. Joe can be added as our Discussant at that time.

Speaking Truth to Anthropology: Reckonings, Reflections, & Contributions of American Indian Scholars in the Profession

Since the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, Israel has deepened colonization and the practices of contorol in myriad ways, increasing settlement expansion, constructing a separation wall, deepening urban apartheid in Jerusalem, intensifying mass incarceration, continuing a refusal of return for Palestinian refugees, and implementing a catastrophic blockade of Gaza. Israeli settler colonialism also presents a problem of knowledge production itself: Palestinians have long been dismissed as having a tenuous relationship to the production of knowledge (e.g. Said 1984). Still, recent years have seen Palestine and the Palestinians become “increasingly admissible as subjects for anthropological inquiry” (Furani and Rabinowitz 2011: 476). Indeed, ethnographic accounts on a range of subjects flourished as anthropologists began to “question Israel’s efforts to repress Palestinian nationalism and to normalize its own colonial and racial character” (ibid 481). Among those subjects is how Palestinian political expression and expression about Palestine is restricted by academic institutions and how Palestinians and their allies can respond to this situation. When the very act of writing Palestinians into a history of the present--or articulating Palestinian identity in the street--is criminalized or stigmatized, including by being equated with anti-Semitism, what are the stakes of a politically engaged anthropology of Palestine? What are our ethical obligations as Palestinian anthropologists, and allies, to engage in what Michel Foucault has problematized as parrhesia (1983)•that is, truth telling, or speaking truth to power, even when we know that to do so is to face the dangers of racial and epistemic violence? What are our responsibilities if we have the “privilege” of operating from the North American academy but face the possibility of virulent assaults on our character and reputation and indeed the prospect of losing our careers? This panel brings together a group of Palestinian anthropologists operating in Israeli and US institutions and allied scholars of the Israeli state to discuss the ethical implications of producing anthropological knowledge on Palestine and the Palestinian people across various spaces. We consider how educational institutions--primary, secondary, and tertiary--can limit how young Palestinians in Israel see themselves. Nevertheless political organizing building on Palestinian values like sumud, or steadfastness, and the building of independent academic institutions can transform possibilities for expression. We address how the Israeli security state also can impact North American higher education in spurious ways. We consider how Palestinians in the West Bank--who may have long seemed to be at the center of the Palestinian national project--are limited in their political expression by the repression of the Palestinian Authority and multifaceted violences of Israeli military occupation. While we will focus on the limitations on speech that arise depending on one’s geographic location in Israel’s 1948 territories, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or North America, we will raise questions relevant to any anthropologist working in alliance with marginalized groups speaking truth to power and struggling for justice and liberation. If, as Deeb and Winegar argue, “Israel-Palestine politics can be considered a bellwether of anthropology’s future,” (181) parrhesia in Palestine can help advance the project of “decolonizing anthropology” (Harrison 1991).

Premium content

Taxonomies of the present

Downloads

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Emergent Subterranean Taxonomies in the Yucatan Peninsula

Similar lecture

What is a Ravine? Social Taxonomies of the Multiform in Guatemala City