United States

In this roundtable, participants will present on the distinctive responsibilities that can accompany anthropological work around, on, through, with or for NGOs and Non-Profits. Under what circumstances should we seek to align ourselves with the NGOs and non-profits “around” which work on issues of shared interest? How might critical research “on” the work of NGOs and non-profits enable greater accountability to others, including the people for whom this work is ostensibly done? What obligations come with working “through” NGOs and non-profits, i.e. using their resources, insights, and existing networks to launch projects that may or may not be of any use to them? How can and should anthropologists’ responsibilities to the NGOs and non-profits “with” which they collaborate be governed by existing codes of professional or institutional ethics? Given all we’ve learned of the complexities of NGOs and non-profits, how should we be preparing ourselves and our students for careers working “for” these organizations?

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Interest Group on NGOs and Non-Profits Roundtable: Responsibilities of Working Around, On, Through, With, and For NGOs and Non-Profits

panel

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.

In a March 2020 essay in The Atlantic, writer Yasmeen Serhan suggested that the term “populism” has become so widely deployed that it essentially represents “that which we do not like.” Indeed it so regularly references Trump’s supporters and white nationalism as well as Brexit, The Netherland’s Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen in France, and other xenophobic neo-nationalist movements that it often means both racist and authoritarian. At the same time, populist movements like Italy’s Five Star Movement are not as right-wing and have launched their predominantly online grassroots movement using digital technology in innovative ways. What kinds of epistemological work does the rhetoric of “populism” enact for those who deploy it? What ways of knowing undergird its diffusion? And what of populism’s materiality? What of the infrastructure it requires, the digital networks it creates and relies on, and the material traces it leaves behind? In their recent volume Beyond Populism, Jeff Maskovsky and Sophie Bjork-James suggest that the “angry politics” that are often termed populist are responding to the failures of neoliberal regimes. The panel takes up this insight particularly insofar as movements respond to new technological arrangements and digital modes of production, volatile financial markets, and extreme forms of inequality and alienation. How do leaders and movements who marshal populist rhetoric gain credibility and value by the collapse of protections and safeguards? How do neoliberal assemblages of rapid global circulation produce retrograde fantasies for national boundaries, ethnic and racial homogeneity and the patriarchal family? Our discussion and debate will engage these topics as well as participant's unique ethnographic and historical insights .

Infrastructures of populism: material traces, digital networks, and financial assemblages

This session focuses on various “desires” of pop-culture fandom community in East Asia, where the transnational consumption of content and the formation of fandom are rapidly proceeding. Since the movement of people and information across borders has become increasingly prevalent in East Asia, the opportunities for people from different cultural and historical backgrounds to contact with one another are also increasing rapidly. In this situation, at first glance, it can be seen that people are consuming the same content; however, there are a variety of conflicts and misunderstandings inherent among them. On the other hand, it is certain that sharing the same content can encourage people to engage in dialogues with each other and advance mutual understanding. From such a viewpoint, this panel will focus on the practices of fandom caused by individuals’ desires in the transnational consumption of content, such as through contents tourism practices, and will, through case studies from various perspectives, discuss how those practices can encourage or control conflicts and mutual understanding. Specifically, we, researchers from three different countries (Japan, Korea, China), attempt to clarify the following three points through several case studies on different countries/areas, content, and fandom. First, which desires or appetites can be observed among East Asian fandoms? Second, how can narrative worlds related to conflict or mutual understanding cause desires or appetites and how can they be consumed transnationally? Third, what kind of passionate practices are caused by these desires of fandom, and consequently, what kind of conflicts or dialogue can be created transnationally in fandom?

Imaginaries and Desires of Fandom: Immersion, Conflicts, and Mutual Understanding in Contents Tourism

This panel addresses so-called “folkloric” forms of evidence and authority in contemporary political and legal contexts. Scholars have historically seen such authority in supposedly modern contexts as acts of transplantation•character toys of Taiwanese gods are transplanted gods, Berkeley-based shamans are New Age re-creations of older roles. However, this overlooks the intricate ways in which political relations and folkloric notions of authority and evidence are co-constitutive. The speakers are exploring two intertwined questions about the mutually constitutive links between social relations and contexts, namely: How, and with what baggage, do folkloric indexes travel from context to context? And, to what extent do particular social relations and folkloric indexes recursively constitute their contexts? To address this question ethnographically, the authors explore how folkloric authority•when framed as traditional and locatable--is promised and performed in contexts constructed as modern and displaceable.  Following Briggs' insights in his 2021 book, Unlearning, this panel examines how people engaged in establishing persuasive political frameworks increasingly find the dichotomy between the traditional and the modern good to think with, often implicitly invoking the dialectic processes inherent to this dichotomy in efforts to understand widespread economic, legal, and social transformations, and propose alternatives. While the comparison between tradition and modern seems endemic to the political moment, the techniques with which people create this dichotomy are quite divergent, techniques which produce different forms of authority, different gendered relations, as well as different sorts of hybrid contexts. Not all techniques for producing such dichotomies are equally effective, or mutually compatible. Sometimes these diverse political projects resonate with each other for a time, creating productive yet finite collaborations. The connections between authority and folklore are culturally specific, and it is this specificity that structures both how well forms of authority travel, and how well they articulate with putatively modern contexts.

How Folklore Persuades in its Travels

Authority, Folklore and Contested Knowledge: Some Perspectives on QAnon and Covid-19 Conspiracy Theories

Cute, Sexy, Composite: Recent Transformations of the Goddess Mazu in Taiwan

In Racialized Language Discourse, What Counts as Authority and Evidence?

Intergenerational Re-Signification & Changing Political Contexts in Northwest China

The Uses of Bias in Faculty Hiring and Teaching Evaluations

Tradition in Transition: The Irish Folkloric Record on the Move

This panel brings together the work of scholars engaged in struggle. Struggle names the subject of the texts, as well as the conditions under which they are produced. The research questions that guide “ethnographies of struggle” emerge from the unresolved issues confronting movements struggling against injustice. Ongoing debates within the movements about political tactics and strategies • for example, how to relate to the state and capital • often result in tensions that highlight the challenges to preserving an autonomous and transformative political agenda while engaging in broader political arenas. As participants in these spaces, we examine the limits and possibilities for integrating the theory and practice of movements into our research methodology. Drawing on experiences from Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and beyond, the presenters on this panel explore the potential for ethnography to disrupt the normative pull of conventional academic research. Building on multiple traditions of “intellectual dissidence” (Shah 2020), this panel creates space for (co-)imagining transgressive ethnographic praxes.

Premium content

Interest Group on NGOs and Non-Profits Roundtable: Responsibilities of Working Around, On, Through, With, and For NGOs and Non-Profits

Downloads

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Infrastructures of populism: material traces, digital networks, and financial assemblages