United States

At least 15 million Roma live around the world. This diasporic population, which originated in North India more than a thousand years ago, has faced discrimination and oppression in multiple forms across time and place, including slavery in Romania for 500 years, genocide and ethnic cleansing during the Porajmos (Romani Holocaust), and ongoing, systemic oppression and neglect in every place Roma live, from the United States to Europe, Australia and Brazil to Russia. Against this background, the recognition and inclusion of Roma is critical. A worldwide movement has been working to increase the visibility and influence of Roma art, music, dance, culture, history, activism, and resilience. Anthropologist, activist, performer, and folklorist Carol Silverman has been an active member of this movement for decades. This roundtable centers on Roma rights and recognition, truth and responsibility, by celebrating the work of Carol Silverman, who is retiring after 40 years at the University of Oregon. Carol Silverman (who is not Romani) exemplifies what it means to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and perform as anthropologists. Focusing on Bulgaria and Macedonia as well as on Balkan Romani migrants to North America and Western Europe, Silverman has investigated the relationship among politics, ethnicity, ritual, music, and gender. More specifically, she has explored the phenomenon of “Gypsy” music in relation to issues of appropriation, representation, and the negotiation of identities in the world music market. A true public scholar, in addition to dozens of academic book chapters and articles, she has also designed exhibits and written op-eds, festival booklets, and websites, liner notes for recordings, and documentary photographs. Her first book Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (2012) came with an extensive accompanying website with video and audio clips. Her second book, Ivo Papasov’s Balkanology (2021), highlights the ways in which Romani musicians in Bulgaria resisted the communist state’s prohibition against Romani music and fashioned a genre that became a youth movement in Bulgaria and a world music phenomenon. As a performer, she has given over 300 concerts, workshops, lectures and demonstrations on Balkan, including Romani, folk music and its cultural context. Silverman also serves on the board of the US NGO Voice of Roma, with which she has crafted annual public culture programs. Participants in this roundtable include a diverse representation of Carol’s many students and collaborators, who are performers, artists, activists, and scholars in their own right. Participants will address the goals of equity, diversity, inclusion, and power in their respective fields, and through the lens of civil society, music, performance, politics, and art, while also recognizing the extraordinary work and influence of Carol Silverman.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Truth and Responsibility in Romani Studies: Celebrating the Work of Carol Silverman

diaspora

race and racism

ethnomusicology

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.

panel

Truth is hard. It pulls back the curtain, dispenses with illusion, and insists upon reckoning. The recent homegoing of iconic Black comedian Paul Mooney reminds us, however, that truth is the only way forward. His performances were revered for their unwavering candor, frequently eliciting the enthusiastic refrain, “Say it, Paul!” Likewise encouraged, linguistic anthropologist Lanita Jacobs (2009) has “been charged, on many occasions, by Blackwomen scholars, mothers, clients, friends, etc. to “Tell the truth”” Concordant with the theme of this year’s annual meeting, the scholars on this roundtable will speak truth to power in discussing the semiotic terrain of raciogender. Remarkable silences remain in anthropology around the meaningful ways race and gender intersect. While there is a rich and long history of Blackfeminist anthropology spanning many subdisciplines (McClaurin 2001), misogynoir persists across the field, the academy, and the world. Over a year after the 2020 surge in protests against anti-Black police brutality precipitated by officers murdering George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, no officers have been charged for the shooting death of the latter. And yet, not long after, Kamala Harris became the first Blackwoman to serve as Vice President of the United States. What truths can anthropology tell about the gendered dimensions of anti-Black state violence? What truths can it tell about what Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) described as “representational intersectionality”? These types of questions, those that demand earnest consideration of how raciogender’s multiplicative effects influence our lives and institutions, motivation our interest in holding space for dialogue.  As such, this roundtable focuses on the ways meaning-making practices and signification reveal the mutual constitutions of language, race, and gender as well as the sociopolitical implications therein. We discuss, specifically, the ways embodied and linguistic performances of Black genders (understood as also inextricable from sexuality) construct a topographic terrain of discourse. Toward that end, we bring together a group of scholars coming from various angles on the subject, allowing us to bring often isolated perspectives together, generating cross-pollination of ideas. The range of perspective among our participants opens a unique space for concurrent discussion of such diverse topics as racialized masculinity in digital space, the construction of cosmopolitan femininity through racialised appropriation in global musical performance, the discursive construction of Blackfemme sacred geographies, the reproductive capabilities of performativity on the blackqueerfeminine plane, and so on. This conversation, we suggest further, requires attending to the responsibility and ability of anthropology to disrupt anti-Blackness, misogyny, and queer/transphobia (among other societal ails) in the study of humanity. We will attempt to, as Audre Lorde (1978) put it, transform “silence into language and action”.

The Semiotic Terrain of Raciogender: A Dialogue

Anthropologist Pem Buck’s The Punishment Monopoly challenges anthropology to take seriously the history of dispossession in the study of the construction of white supremacy and class formation. Further, her work posits the centralization of the power to punish as a sine qua non of both, and of state formation itself. In a work of truly public scholarship, Buck reaches into her own family’s history and mythology to reexamine the state as a historically constructed entity. The book ranges widely, in time, geography, and political formations, as she follows one branch of her ancestors and the people they enslaved, fought, and dispossessed from the late 1500s in the Highlands of Scotland and England, through the 1600s in Igboland, Powhatan Virginia, and colonial Virginia, to the mid-1800s in Kentucky. A final chapter connects the history of the power to punish and the dispossession it enabled to ongoing processes in the present. How does Buck’s book push anthropology to examine the themes of whiteness, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the rise of the carceral state? How does it enrich our understanding of the some of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century•issues such as the exploitation and mass detention of immigrants, the judicial and extra-judicial killings of people of color and some poor whites, mass incarceration, racialized phobias constructing enemies, and now the threat of a fascistic response to Covid-19? What are the ways in which Buck’s work challenges us to create an anthropology for the public?

The Power to Punish: In Honor of Pem Buck's The Punishment Monopoly

The last decade has witnessed an explosion in the number of books and articles dedicated to forecasting the transformations, futures, and ends of work. In Give a Man a Fish, James Ferguson (2015) marshalled his ethnography of southern Africa to offer a radical vision of a sweeping move from productivism toward a new “politics of distribution.” Here, he argued, one's worth, deservingness, and social personhood would not be contingent on the marginal value of one's productivity but on the fundamental right to a share in the collective patrimony of post-industrial society. Universal basic income trials, referenda on citizen's income schemes, and the growth of public interest in policy proposals like Andrew Yang's “freedom dividend” suggest that distributivism has become a thinkable, even desirable politics. And yet, around the world, there is a curious persistence to work and its ethics. Against the threat of technological unemployment, one finds no shortage of exhortations to produce•to produce faster, to produce more. These productivist imperatives are typically bound to broader moral frameworks, showing work to be central not only to how people “make a living” but conceive of and achieve “a life worth living” (Narotzky and Besnier 2014). Beyond its moral valences, productivism is wound tightly with subjectivity, making both work and the refusal to work constitutive elements of identity, selfhood, and belonging (Lane 2011; Ong 1987; Weeks 2011). Moreover, work and its ethics continue to organize our relationships and our time (Thompson 1967), structuring and sustaining social institutions, the rhythms of everyday life, and the phases of the lifecycle (Lynch and Mains 2016). For a world tilting toward its distributivist possibilities, we seem unable to exorcise productivist desires, longings, anxieties, and modes of living from our increasingly technologized societies. This roundtable draws together ethnographers of the United States, Japan, China, Norway, and Kyrgyzstan. Their work examines a variety of topics, including the tension between distributivist and productivist logics in rural secondhand markets, neoliberal corporate restructuring, social democracy, “social parasitism”, and the search for employment in "crisis economies." By bringing creating space for a virtual dialogue, this roundtable aims to examine the curious persistence of productivism at a moment when work as we have known it appears to face significant challenge, curtailment, or even wholesale abolition.

The Persistence of Productivism

The rigor, heterogeneity and creative vision of medical anthropologists are apparent in the ongoing proliferation of modes of writing currently emerging in the field. Some reflect the diversity of audiences for whom medical anthropologists write: students, patient populations, clinicians, public health practitioners, scientists, journalists, policymakers and more general publics as medical and scientific technologies are commercialized to become household items for the self-governance of well-being. In addition to reaching beyond disciplinary audiences, some efforts center on trying to get outside the confines of scholarly books and articles in a time when communicative technologies and practices are diversifying and multiplying rapidly. Participants have created websites, such as Somatosphere, that feature web-based essays that respond more rapidly to developments and challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Other participants have written trade books and newspaper op-ed pieces designed to reach large audiences. Like other anthropologists, medical anthropologists are experimenting with forms of writing, using the graphic novel, literary non-fiction formats, creative writing and poetry genres as well as other formats, such as photography, videography, and sound production to reach new audiences and push readers to think in different ways. Two participants, as editors of major medical anthropology journals, are stretching the limits of what comes between the covers of print and digital issues to bring in a variety of other forms of writing and types of materials. Rather than training their students narrowly in forms of academic writing•leaving the acquisition of new modes of engaging audiences to post-graduation individual endeavors•some roundtable members are offering seminars or workshops on pressing current events that teach these forms of more-than-academic writing. At the same time that it will enable panelists to report on how they have expanded the envelope of academic writing in medical anthropology and the successes and obstacles they have encountered along the way, this roundtable will point toward the future. What challenges lie ahead? What avenues for innovation and dissemination can be imagined? How will different styles and venues contribute to analytic and ethnographic innovation? Lastly, how do authors consciously attend to expression, voice and writing as a practice that connects them with the larger world? We anticipate that the roundtable will interest medical anthropologists from graduate and undergraduate students to the most experienced scholars and practitioners. Instead of traditional presentations, panelists will read or share an idea or prose from their work to launch a discussion on possibilities for the future. We will also open up space for graduate students and those in the beginning stages of their careers to raise questions regarding balancing the forms and venues of writing, thus offering a renewed space for medical anthropologists’ many modes of expression. The goal of this work is simple• to ensure that we use our voices to responsibly and creatively contribute to how stories get told about the world.

The Futures of Writing in Medical Anthropology: Voice and Practice

Current rhetoric positions higher education as a key institution for individuals’ social mobility and economic success and as remedy for injustice. But, central to higher education are issues of access and equity that must be excavated for the institution to truly become a change agent. The truth of what college “is” must be analyzed from both etic and emic perspectives to be understood as constructed by society, as reflective of the lived experiences of those within it, and as the overlapping and contrasting realities of all of these. A quandary of what constitutes the identities in and of postsecondary education emerges. On one hand the state, as represented by policy makers, accrediting bodies, etc. focuses on neoliberal perspectives of accountability and producing a market product that will meet the goal of providing students with value for dollar. This process reduces what higher education is to a system of training for the job market (Canaan and Shumar, 2008). However, contingent on and contributing to the university’s legitimacy are the students and communities they serve. Anthropological studies have illuminated how spaces of possibility emerge within higher education that are reflective of social identities and justice (Brayboy, 2005; Tierney, 1993). These potentials for becoming, on the part of the faculty, student, and community, rely on higher education being an open and expansive field, not one narrowed by a perspective of accountability and governing by numbers (Shore & Wright 2015). Nevertheless, these identities are being commodified by institutions as an attempt to “diversify” student populations and sell a neoliberal narrative. Thus student populations are increasingly diverse regarding ethnicity, language, abilities, gender, immigration status, and socioeconomic status (amongst others) (NCES, 2019). Hence, the identity of the institution has changed in part because the student population has changed and the identities of students within higher education have changed presumably because the institution has changed. But, to what extent are these identities congruent? To what extent are they repellent? Perhaps, how are they intersecting? Several tenets of this identity quandary are worth exploring. First, the identities in and of post-secondary institutions, and the forces influencing them, must be understood as lived experiences. Deep ethnographic research is needed to understand how the intersecting identities of post-secondary stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, administrators, community members) are experienced in higher education. Second, the positionality of higher education, and its ideological influences, need to be examined in relation to whether stakeholders can fully live their complex identities within the institution. Finally, a multifaceted comparison between society’s perspective of higher education’s identity, the perspective of the institution on its own identity, and the nuanced experiences of those who co-construct its cultural space is necessary to thoroughly understand the true identity of today’s post-secondary education. This purview of research seeks to capture a truthful assessment and critique of the current identities of and in post-secondary education, serving as a space for and of contemplative thought regarding what higher education is and could become.

The Emic and Etic Identities of Higher Education

Digital technologies increasingly play a prominent role in communication within and outside the classroom. Digital technologies also offer possibilities to facilitate as well as complicate efforts to promote equity and diversity in teaching as well as collaborative/participatory research that works toward decolonizing truth making. Following this year’s AAA Theme, which highlights pedagogy as a "key medium for the communication of anthropological truths,"* this roundtable features effective strategies for mobilizing digital technologies to support equity and diversity within anthropological pedagogy and student research, to foster equitable collaborations and interactions among our communities and students, and to help students become critical consumers and producers of data. The roundtable discusses the possibilities of digital technologies to address issues of power and inclusion in anthropological pedagogy. It demonstrates how cloud sharing and image-sharing projection software can be used to distribute power from the instructor to students in productive ways and give voice to those who do not feel comfortable participating in class. In addition, it explores how to take online teaching to the next level by effectively mobilizing virtual reality to foster interactivity and virtual co-presence. Not only are such efforts of inclusion important for countering feelings of isolation commonly reported during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they also open up new possibilities for student engagement that may not otherwise be possible. At the same time, presenters illustrate how such software can help students reflect on different subjectivities and how “truths” are constructed; ultimately helping students become critical consumers of information. The roundtable also investigates how digital technologies can be mobilized to help students become responsible co-producers of "truths" through collaborative/participatory research and digital ethnography. From start to finish, presenters illustrate how to help students “enter” into a digital field site, navigate the ethics of engagement in digital ethnography, and coproduce public-facing digital deliverables that foster civically engaged dialogue and align with community members’ objectives. To illustrate this process, the roundtable draws on both long-term and recently established collaborations. Presenters discuss a decade-old community-based collaboration among Jewish and African-American elders in Indianapolis and students in an ethnographic methods course as well as a recently established university engagement with eSports and accompanying digital ethnography project within a qualitative methods course. Considering that responsible pedagogy involves multiple stakeholders, including not just faculty, students, and community members but also administrators and staff, the roundtable also explores how to design and scale up and out an online program originally developed for students to recognize interpersonal and systemic forms of bias. It illustrates how lessons learned can be applied for staff and faculty professional development. It also presents advice on designing online courses and curriculum and mobilizing course management systems to be more inclusive of students from diverse backgrounds. Through featuring work from cultural anthropology and archaeology at public and private universities that serve a wide range of students, this roundtable discusses key “how-to” steps for mobilizing digital technology to reflect on and address the power dynamics and truth making we engage in with our students and our communities. *https://www.americananthro.org/AM_Theme

Teaching with Digital Technologies: Mobilizing Anthropology for Responsible Pedagogical Design and Outreach

Our roundtable foregrounds space in its analysis of Muslim communities in urban Philadelphia (Kashani 2018, Stewart 1996). Known to many as “Mecca of the West,” Philadelphia is unique for its large and visible Muslim population, the majority of whom are Black American. Given this context, we ask how Islam shapes Philadelphia’s urban landscape and in turn, how the various cultures of Philadelphia shape Islamic practices and understandings of being Muslim in the city. Ultimately, this roundtable hopes to facilitate a better understanding of how space entrenches power asymmetries among Muslims and between researchers and interlocutors by asking: How are space and Islam entangled throughout the city? How do Islamic spaces subvert and/or reify racial, socioeconomic, and gendered hierarchies in the city? How do the spaces we occupy•both the sites of our research and the role(s) we take as ethnographer, participant, writer, and educator•inform our research? How does our positionality shape our findings and impact our interlocutors? To delve into these questions, we will focus on four case studies: A mosque, a school, a Muslim NGO, and a grocery store. By studying ritual, secular, and commercial institutions, we hope to show how Muslim Philadelphians imprint their faith on the city and how historical and contemporary forces inform the spaces Muslims are able to occupy. Our roundtable will identify the effects of local particularities on/of these spaces•such as geography, layout, demographics, and aesthetics. Moreover, we will discuss scholarly methods for supporting our interlocutors and their communities through spatial positioning.

Space, Race, & Islam in Muslim Philadelphia

Anthropology has been rightly called to respond to injustices with more than witnessing and documentation (“thick description”) by turning to “thick solidarity [that] layers interpersonal empathy with historical analysis, political acumen, and a willingness to be led by those most directly impacted” (Liu and Shange 2018, 196). The present moment demands that we transform anthropology such that the discipline actively speaks to and acts in the face of great injustices.  Yet, at first blush, our tools for action seem limited. The academic journal has conventionally been one of the major spaces through which the discipline has engaged the political moment, but it is a format that is limited in terms of timeliness, reach, inclusivity, accessibility, form, and more. Indeed, journals are complicit in and reinforce systems of injustice. They are commonly a mechanism for further silencing and exclusion that is justified by seemingly neutral demands for standards of academic excellence, which tacitly center around imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchal forms of capital that are attuned to specific regions, nations and people groups. Consequently, it is crucial that we re-think our craft and simultaneously re-imagine our spaces of dissemination in ways that challenge scholarly complacency. For those anthropologists working in and across political and legal spaces (and surely all of us are, in some ways, engaging the political and sociolegal), this necessity is rendered all the more urgent by the social justice struggles in the contemporary fields in which we work and their profound linkages with those continuing struggles that have taken place in cotton, cane, tobacco, rice, cocoa and other fields in which many have been forced to labor (Shange 2019, 10). In this roundtable, we therefore ask: How can academic journals overcome their limitations in ways that render them tools that fundamentally transform what anthropology is and how it engages with urgent contemporary struggles and historical injustices? Can the academic journal shift from being a platform of anthropological witnessing to a space of transformative action? Is it possible for the Political and Legal Anthropology Review [PoLAR] to be such a site for critical, decolonial, and abolitionist anthropology? If so, how?  The roundtable is convened by the incoming Co-Editors of PoLAR, and brings together those who can speak to the vision and future of PoLAR from different entry-points: journal founders, former editors, those in other sections, and those who have published in the journal. The roundtable creates a space for collaborative critique and developing ideas for how to move towards deeply transformative forms of critical, decolonial, and abolitionist engagement and action in the space of PoLAR (and potentially other AAA journals). At a time when neoliberal pressures in the academy and “job market” demand ever-increasing individualization of our career profiles and writing for impact factors rather than content value, we envision this roundtable and the conversations it engenders as a space of resistance through collaboration, accountability through openness and recognition, and transformation through critique and “alter-Native” (Grande 2016) re-imaginings of political and legal anthropology.

Setting Political and Legal Anthropology Ablaze with "Thick Solidarity"

For an uber-anthropological category animating social relations, land is paradoxically remarkably undertheorized. Land remains salient in anthropological studies of property and law; agrarian relations; ecology, development and the state; nationalism, belonging, identity and ritual; or housing, urbanization and infrastructure, to name a few. However, with few exceptions, anthropologists have not deeply engaged with the question ‘what is land?’ Tania Li reminds us that the meanings of land are not commensurable, or stable; with its diverse array of affordances, including the capacity to sustain human life, the materiality, location and inscription devices used to shape and assemble land as a ‘resource,’ matter. As emergent crises around climate change, refugees, pandemics and the rise of the right unfold, a considered understanding of how land is mobilized, materially, discursively, affectually or semiotically, enables a clearer sense of what is at stake; moves us beyond implicit assumptions; identifies disciplinary and methodological contributions; and helps articulate emergent questions that the category of land foregrounds. This roundtable draws on land’s unequal polysemy, to ask: what is land; what does land do; and what do we (as scholars) do with land? We are not only interested in how land is understood, but also in how anthropological knowledge about land is produced and developed. How are social relations around land articulated through colonial and post-colonial regimes; how are they conceptualized by various actors; and how may they inform the conceptualization of land? Does land have agency; what is its history; does its materiality shift; how may we conceptualize land as more-than-human nature? What insights does the ethnographic method contribute to the anthropology of land? As a fundamental affordance for the conditions of life on earth, does land have a life beyond anthropocentric social relations, and under what conditions are such relations made possible? The roundtable discusses thematic linkages across ex-, post- and settler-colonial, rural, urban, and urbanizing land regimes; the propertization and territorialization of land, water, forest, labour and non-human species and matter; contested historical claims and belonging mediated by law, state and identity; ontologies of land informed by indigeneity, race, caste, gender, multi-species relations and capitalism; the materiality of land, its fungibility, and subsoil properties generating value relations; and financial, real estate, infrastructure, extractive and agrarian potentialities of land in the anthropocene. Sengupta discusses colonial tenures, memorialized custom and indigeneity claims in east central India’s bauxite zone. Grant examines fragmented Diné lands and the oil and gas lease property-form in eastern Navajo. León Araya interrogates the ghosts of past plantations animating Costa Rican development and state formation. Sampat tracks casteist colonial British and Portuguese genealogies of landed property prefiguring contemporary land impasse in India. Bosworth analyzes settler infrastructures of desire in the U.S. Great Plains oil pipeline construction. Sippel examines practices reimagining land as a revenue-generating and tradable financial asset class in Australia. Ghertner traces land’s fungibility, as socialities of non-privatized agglomeration economies exceed property models in New Delhi, India. Finally, Li brings to bear insights on land as an anthropological category.

Roundtable on Anthropology of Land

Environmental sustainability and environmental justice are often characterized as systemic solutions that are attributed to high-tech, highly educated, middle-class worker sectors located in or trained by the global poles of power. Conventionally, Anthropologists have disrupted hegemonic ideas like these by investigating the complex social relations that undergird the labor and productivity in environmental systems at micro, meso, and macro levels. This panel explores the crucial role of the invisible environmental labor that holds our worlds together. Gutierrez will examine how attempts to institutionalize Environmental Justice in the United States’ context of EPA’s Superfund Cleanup Program ultimately shapes the conditions of possibility for what counts as knowledge and labor. Kramer will explore how Upper Myanmar cultivators transplanting commercially valuable and rare species as an invisible form of environmental labor in efforts to sustain biodiversity that points to a truth that they, themselves, advocate: active community cultivation over in situ protections in the form of forest reserves and national commons. Sangaramoorthy will trace how immigrants involved in poultry, agricultural, and seafood industries in rural contexts experience and embody precarity and how it affects their health and well-being through the concept of liminality. Ortiz will discuss how Mexican immigrant women’s expertise is sidelined by intersecting forces including gender role ideals, transnational immigration policies, and employer recruitment practices. Wilhoit will explore how Andean women--dependent upon local ecologies and disproportionately responsible for family well-being--are imagined as invested in sustainability and tasked with environmental labor that becomes inseparable from their ‘domestic’ work as partners, parents and community leaders in the context of the Andes. O’Leary will demonstrate how the everyday politics of washing the city is undergirded by local forms of gendered environmental labor which both reinforce and interrupt traditional water collection urban India. Instead of focusing only on how cultural practices, values, and epistemologies transform the peoplescapes of local and regional case studies, this roundtable asks how depictions of “truths” and “responsibilities” in these systems obscure, address, and challenge standard narratives of what constitutes production and labor in the sustainable future. It argues that without accounting for the invisible environmental labor inherent in sustainability solutions, environmental justice is not a viable reality.

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