United States

The desire to retain and preserve objects that hold information about individuals can prompt the creation of bureaus, libraries, databases and archives. Anthropologists have studied the inception and day-to-day maintenance of such informational infrastructures to shed light on the ways in which material forms, particularly paperwork, create bureaucratic power and authority (Feldman 2008, Gupta 2012, Hull 2012, Mathur 2016). Files, forms and documents speak to us about the logics that animate record-keeping. This panel takes a different route to the study of documents, namely through an attention to disposal. It considers disposal to be a key moment in the life of records. It asks: In the movement from observation to file, what information is deemed worthy of deletion? As paper is endowed with authority, are other modes of life subsumed within it or silenced? If law, medicine and claims to citizenship require documents that show precedent, when are such documents allowed to expire and be disposed of? The ability of paper to retain potential even when it has lost day-to-day significance guides this panel’s approach to disposal. If, as the media theorist Cornelia Vismann argues, wastepaper is an institution, one that necessarily responds to the “monstrous proportions” of paper generated in bureaucracies (2016, 161), how is disposability communicated, enacted or refused? This panel will be a platform that enables conversations about the afterlives of bureaucratic artefacts. We hope that casting the collection and retention of informational objects in light of their disposability will allow us access to a more dynamic picture of power, one that takes into account the time limits, temporalities of attachment, and material frailties of objects used to stabilize power. We also hope that an attention to disposal will grant us ethnographic entry into liminal spaces of administrative infrastructures: places like wastebaskets, shredders and trash files or suitcases, wallets and laptops where paper languishes, capable of both obsolescence and reactivation.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Recording the Evidence: Relevant Signs in Forensic Medicine

paperwork

bureaucracy

power

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

Records of Illness: Understanding How Medical Documents Make Illness Narratives

Across varied institutional settings (public health, juridical, environmental, humanitarian, educational etc.), “care” for a given population is translated into service with specific, often idealistically determined, goals. Care, as the “the way someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the other who matters,” has become a core object of anthropological interest (Stevenson 2016). However, the practices of care, and the ethics that inform those practices, can serve as an affective double-bind in which we form attachments which, themselves, serve as obstacles to our goals (Berlant 2011). Grounded in the complex entanglements between caring, service provision, idealism, and outcome based metrics, this panel uses the theorization put forward by Berlant in Cruel Optimism to interrogate the efficacy of how policy makers, advocates, and institutional actors “care.” Given that “Berlant argues that the social-democratic promises of political and social equality and upward mobility are unachievable fantasies within liberal-capitalist societies that can no longer provide such opportunities” (Edwards 2015) we ask, what purpose is served to continue to aim for unreachable goals? How might institutions and institutional actors plan around normative narratives of success? How might we move away from the constantly elusive hope that a focus on injustice will create lasting change in order to design programs, policies and interventions that center alternative methods for determining, adjusting and interpreting outcomes? Given the recent and unprecedented breakdown of infrastructures designed to address the varied needs of communities, it is even more pressing that we question a cruelly optimistic attachment to the perfectibility of our systems as we imagine alternatives for producing a liveable future. The papers in this panel explore these central questions through an ethnographic attentiveness to diverse institutional settings. From philanthropy in Flint Michigan to environmental policy in Brazil, post-prison reintegration programs in New Orleans, refugee health care in Philadelphia, and immigration courtrooms throughout the U.S., each author explores the emergent intimacies, implications and impossibilities of “care.” We probe the entangled responsibilities of institutions, our interlocutors, and ourselves in systems whose logics seem to paradoxically produce the very conditions they strive to upend. Each paper probes novel forms of constraint generated through practices of care that aim to produce alternative possibilities. As a whole, this panel is both a reflection on myriad efforts to achieve justice and a call to imagine what it might look like to repair the present.

Cruel Optimism, Care, and Aspirations for Producing a Liveable Future

"If I just had scars" Reflections on Truth and Responsibility in the Asylum Process

"If one fails, we all fail": Philanthropy and Collective Self-Responsibility in the Postwelfare United States

Fatal Dependencies: The Intimacy of Carceral Care

Humanitarian Anthropology: Complicity & Action in a Time of Crisis

Looking Back: On Reparation's Affects in Brazil's Environmental Law

In the spring of 2018, the remains of 95 people were resurfaced on the grounds of a construction site in Sugar Land, TX. These remains were subsequently identified by archivists, historians, and archaeologists as 95 Black men and women who were subjected to the convict lease system, a penal labor system adopted by many Southern states post-Emancipation to mitigate the loss of economies solely supported by slave labor (Haley 2016; LeFlouria 2015; Perkinson 2010). In the three years that have passed since the initial resurfacing of the remains, much has occurred in the political, legal, and public sectors surrounding the historiography, archaeological analysis, and memorialization of the Sugar Land 95. As researchers whose bodies of work converge under a broad banner of inquiries into Black life, anti-Black violence, and resistance in the past and present, we ask: what responsibilities do we hold as researchers and practitioners towards the reconstruction of the lives and identities of the Sugar Land 95 and other men and women who have been subjected to incarceration? What stories are we telling are their behalf and for whom? Where and how do our disciplinary trainings fall short in research about the carceral state and from where and whom might we draw methodological inspiration? How might we radically shift and reimagine our disciplines through the lens of Black feminisms and rethink how the lives of the Sugar Land 95 are to be remembered and how incarceration might be researched? Using the Sugar Land 95 as a starting point, this panel brings together critical archaeological, biological, and sociocultural perspectives to question, understand, and grapple with their lives, the convict leasing system, and the contemporary carceral landscape. Drawing from Savannah Shange’s concept of “abolitionist anthropology,” which she in part conceptualizes as the “conjuncture of antiblackness theory and a critical anthropology of the state” (Shange 2019:7) and Christina Sharpe’s declaration that “the work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching; new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery” (Sharpe 2016:13), this panel invites scholars and practitioners into a conversation in which we grapple with slavery’s multiple and varied afterlives and attempt to imagine new, more ethical ways forward. Rather than offering a single path forward, panelists will bring a diversity of perspectives to consider how we create truths about the lives of the Sugar Land 95, the systems of power they were subjected to, and how we continue to live with the legacies of those systems to this very day.

Convict Leasing and Its Afterlives: Carcerality, Agricultural Production, and Black Life in the U.S. South

Scientific illiteracy, anti-intellectualism, and mistrust in science have reached crisis levels in the United States, a crisis that has become all too obvious during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In the age of “alternative facts” and anti-science rhetoric, truth has been drowned out. Effectively communicating our science to a wide variety of audiences is critical not only for our research but also for our planet. Communicating with the public is one of the most important responsibilities scientists have. Unfortunately, we are trained to publish our work behind walls of inaccessible jargon and subscription memberships. This isolates us and our work from the general public, the very people we need be communicating with, and, who in many situations, financially support our research • creating a divide between scientists and the public. As such, there has been a vocal call within the scientific community to more effectively engage with the public and close this divide. This session will explore different ways anthropologists have conducted and assessed science communication endeavors and to encourage attendees to define their own outreach goals and achieve meaningful connections with their intended audiences. The hope is that these efforts generate a more scientifically literate public and electorate such that anthropology, and science in general, is more highly valued in terms of funding and inclusion in public policy formation because the effective science communication of today will save the earth of tomorrow.

Bringing Truth to a Post-Truth World: how anthropologists engage and assess their science communication

Gali is a so-called frozen conflict zone in the southern borderland of the de facto state of Abkhazia, separated from the rest of Georgia since the end of the Soviet Union. People from Gali have lived under protracted uncertainty and ambivalence for almost three decades. Opposing sovereignty projects•of Georgia, Abkhazia, and Abkhazia’s patron state Russia•impose themselves on people’s movements and rights through isolation, surveillance, and militarization. Despite its unpredictable shifts and arbitrariness, Gali people have generated ways to navigate this borderland over the years to sustain lives that are vitally dependent on formal and informal crossings. Since 2017, however, crises instigated by pests and viruses have introduced an unusual pattern of nonhuman border emergencies that people have to understand and struggle with. By focusing on three successive and related border emergencies caused by the “invasion” of brown marmorated stinkbugs, H1N1 virus, and COVID-19, this paper explores the new ways borders and interspecies mobilities are imagined under long-term conflict and uncertainty.

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Records of Illness: Understanding How Medical Documents Make Illness Narratives