United States

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, anthropological research has been upended along with nearly all other facets of life of individual anthropologists: family and social interactions, travel, higher education, work and workplaces, and individual health and economic security. How have our responsibilities as researchers and scholars shifted during this time•to the public, to the populations we work with, and to colleagues facing uncertain professional futures? How have anthropologists responded to the ongoing crisis? How has anthropological inquiry been applied to help understand and mitigate the unfolding crisis? This roundtable brings together anthropologists at varying career levels who had to abandon or adapt previous research topics and plans, or quickly organized new research to examine some of the myriad consequences of the pandemic. Their collective experiences reveal some of the many challenges that anthropologists have been impacted by and uniquely alerted to: from disrupted field and lab research, to concerns for vulnerable study populations, to the many problems individuals from diverse communities have been navigating in their daily lives. Presenters in this roundtable draw from these insights in discussing critical anthropological perspectives on the pandemic, as well as ongoing ethical and logistical issues affecting anthropological researchers and study communities. Specifically, we reflect on how anthropologists have contributed to applied COVID-19 research, supported junior colleagues professionally impacted by suspension of field and lab research, and prioritized and advocated for the safety and well-being of ourselves and study communities.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Researcher responsibilities and responses during the COVID-19 pandemic

research/research methods

vulnerability

coronavirus

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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.

While ethnographic scholarship about climate collapse quickly grows, less attention has been paid to the psychical, moral and emotional dimensions of the crisis. This seminar will bring together anthropologists focused on religious and spiritual responses to climate crisis in particular, and how this inflects being human in the so-called “Anthropocene” more generally. While tied to denialism in some cases, religious mobilizations are also engaging in a variety of social movements supporting climate justice. We begin with brief presentations of our individual projects, which span regions from China, India and the Phillipines to Peru, Mexico, Guatemala and the United States, and include transnational linkages across these settings. The town hall will then explore such issues related to the study of culture and climate change as: 1) an overriding secular bias; 2) the atomized nature of the anthropological work in this area; 3) how religious and spiritual perspectives provide actors with ontological, cosmological, and socio-organizational resources for resiliency, adaptation and mitigation; and 4) how scaled and coalitional scholarly and activist exchange in this area can inform and fuel climate justice activism.

Religious and Spiritual Responses to Climate Collapse: Ethnographic Perspectives across Eight Global Sites

Mass protests of all kinds are taking place on the streets and in public spaces in many cities and countries. Some seem to be led by youths seeking political reform and arguing against neoliberal policies, and some (especially in the U.S.) seem to be led by people complaining about certain governors' lockdown policies during the pandemic of 2020. These protests are not typically led by anthropologists, but they warrant anthropological attention. In particular, presentations in this panel will discuss protest movements in Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, and Hong Kong. We will address how the current pandemic will lead to new strategies and issues in activism and new responsibilities and ethical considerations for anthropologists. Political configurations and disciplinary particularities will shape these in varying ways and the presentations in this panel will begin to flesh out what anthropological responsibility in public protests might look like in four locations with recent large-scale social rebellion.

Protests in Public: What Responsibility Do Anthropologists around the World Have?

Brazil changed drastically in the 21st century’s second decade. In 2010, the country’s outgoing president Lula left office with almost 90% approval. As the presidency passed to his Workers' Party successor, Dilma Rousseff, many across the world hailed Brazil as a model of progressive governance in the Global South. Yet, by 2019, those progressive gains were being dismantled as the far right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency of a bitterly divided country. Digging beneath this pendulum swing of policy and politics, Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil conveys how these transformations were made and experienced by Brazilians far from the halls of power. Bringing together powerful and intimate details from Brazil's megacities to rural Amazonia, this roundtable will convene contributors from the edited volume to demonstrate the necessity of ethnography for understanding social and political change, and provide crucial insights on one of the most epochal periods of change in Brazilian history. Within these broader ethnographic contexts, this discussion will emphasize how affect shapes political subjectivity under crises and changing conditions of possibility. This roundtable will, moreover, reconsider contributions to this text alongside important updates about the contemporary moment in Brazil, especially in light of the pandemic.

Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil

How and when do global crises become locally meaningful and politically consequential? These questions have long motivated anthropologists to rethink the process and products of ethnography to better address the violence (Thomas 2011), frictions (Tsing 2005), and expectations (Ferguson 1999) of capitalist ‘modernity’ and post/coloniality across scales (Appel 2019, Gupta and Ferguson 1992, Trouillot 2003). Such re-envisioning of the relationship between global and local has created new opportunities for understanding the daily effects of processes that are otherwise abstracted from experiential lifeworlds. In this roundtable, we build on such path-making research to explore a methodological question emerging from recent fieldwork: How can we theorize processes of environmental change that are primarily experienced and narrated as regional, rather than as global or local? Scholars have been exploring how dynamics of environmental change work ‘on the ground’ through studies of broadly ‘ecological’ relationships that enroll and order objects, persons, and spaces across time. Studies have investigated tea production (Besky 2013), wetland restoration (Cattelino 2015), and waste management (Zhang 2020), among other issues. At the same time, environmental anthropologists have developed a nuanced understanding of ‘region’ that is relational and processual, as well as ecological (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003). Drawing these strands of research together, we argue that tracing processes contributing to climate change often means capturing a regional scale of action and imagination. This roundtable brings together a range of anthropologists investigating climate crisis on a regional scale. In conversation, we explore what a regional approach can offer that analyses of the global or the local do not. We use relationships - often configured and mediated through objects and materialities - to define regions in practice. The goal is to elaborate an approach to climate change that takes the region as an essential site and analytical frame, as well as a stage for new forms of political critique and social mobilization. Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism : US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Duke University Press. Besky, Sarah. 2013. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cattelino, Jessica R. 2015. “The Cultural Politics of Water in the Everglades and Beyond (The 2015 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture). HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 5(3): 235-250. 10.14318/hau5.3.013 Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of URban Life on the Zambian Copper Belt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gupta, Akhil, and Ferguson, James. 1992. Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23. Sivaramakrishnan, K., and Agrawal, Arun, eds. 2003. Regional Modernities: The Cultural Politics of Development in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thomas, Deborah A. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zhang, Amy. 2020. Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolising Waste with the Black Soldier Fly. Cultural Anthropology 35(1): 74•103.

Neither 'Global' Nor 'Local’: Regional Methods in a Time of Climate Crisis

What is the relationship between Native Americans and museums? To explore this question, this roundtable discussion panel brings into conversation European and U.S. anthropologists and American Indians Studies scholars on the natures, sources, and truths of past and present best practices that enable culturally competent collaborations between Native American communities and individuals and museum practitioners. The discussions and presentations on this panel illuminate examples of responsible effective collaboration that lend to the creation of exhibits which expand museum practices while respecting Native American aims and their right to funerary objects and cultural patrimony under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The timely nature of this panel is supported by changing museum practices that are direct precipitates of Native American contestation and truths of culturally insensitive relationships with institutions and recognition by museum professionals of the need for paradigm expansion.

Native Americans and Museums: 
International Perspectives and Collaborative Prospects.

Narratives are primary “truth-telling” instruments that states have used in legitimizing their nation-building efforts, mobilizing citizens in social engineering projects, and pushing forward their ideological agendas. They are also important tools for social groups to construct and maintain identity and solidarity more generally. This is especially significant today in the context of the global crisis of rising nationalism, populism, division and polarization. Based on in-depth ethnographic accounts, textual-analysis and other methods, our roundtable aims to understand cultural milieus, sociopolitical tensions, embodied practices that are involved in nation-states’ and social groups’ inventing, promoting or circulating narratives across different social domains and in the context of distinct regimes of power. On a theoretical level, within a broad, psychological anthropology framework, this panel advocates a “narrative anthropology” approach that places narrative as the center of analysis and articulates an expanded notion of narrative: 1) narrative is considered as a form of semiotic mediation, where narrative tools shape speaking and thinking; 2) narrative analysis also attends to psychological processes including cognition, human emotion and embodiment; and 3) competing narratives are involved in speaking and thinking about truth in national and global contexts. This approach emphasizes the unique contributions of narrative analysis to interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration between anthropology, humanities and cognitive science.  The participants in our roundtable will draw from their individual research projects to provide numerous ethnographic insights from the U.S.,Russia, Georgia, and Central America and across various social domains, and bring these case studies into theoretical dialogue. James V. Wertsch outlines a theoretical blueprint for narrative anthropology, and his paper articulates a proposal for situating narrative anthropology within a broader movement in the social sciences. Nutsa Batiashvili examines nationalist historiography in the Soviet and Post-Soviet South Caucasus to show how national narratives produce both mental and embodied predispositions. Doc Billingsley’s paper, an ethnography of historical memory among K’iche’ Maya communities in the Guatemalan Highlands, reveals two patterns in their narratives and demonstrates how Maya youth draw upon these narratives to craft and revitalize their ethnolinguistic identities. Anna Jacobson’s research, located in a local VA hospital and through a local Hospice Care organization in St. Louis, Missouri, examines how fundamental ethics of care and care interactions are created through the sharing of life stories that re-insert dignity and meaning into otherwise dehumanized spaces. Taken together, our panel highlights the role of narrative in linking truth, nation-states, social groups and individuals’ lived experience.

Narrative Anthropology: Identity, Truth, and Narrative Mediation

This roundtable discusses how accusations of “terrorism” and “radicalization” are disrupting the ordinariness of everyday interactions. Since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, and more recently with the terrorist attacks in various European metropoles, we have witnessed a growing countering violent extremism (CVE) industry across the private and public sectors that aims to prevent “radicalization” and terrorism. The increasing amounts of money, barrages of policies, and exceptional legal measures targeting potential terrorists have changed the relation between Western majorities and Muslim minorities fundamentally.  Through ethnographic examples the roundtable investigates how accusations of “terrorism” and “radicalization” are used to declare states of exception and disrupt everyday interactions. In anthropology, the everyday has been described as a site of encounter and interaction (Lambek, Das). However, the introduction of various counterterrorism and counter-radicalization measures have turned the “everyday” into an arena of suspicion and surveillance. To governments, “the everyday” has become a site where one can identify the transition from “normal” to “extreme” (Danish National Center for Prevention of Extremism, 2020). Social workers, teachers, and networks of mothers are trained to identify signs of potential radicalization across social domains as varied as social work, youth work, education, arts, and within families.  This roundtable discusses how the growing CVE industry inscribes a logic of “exceptionality” into the everyday and how this logic of exception becomes contested and challenged. We ask what kinds of violence are acknowledged or ignored within such a context? How does one live an ordinary life when the ordinary (such as clothes, child-rearing and religious practices) has become the target of exceptionalism? What kind of sociability and solidarities are enabled or rendered impossible? And how does one practice engaged anthropology within this context without becoming the target of exceptionalism oneself?

Muslim Lives in the Global War on Terror. Exceptionalizing the Everyday

In the Chinese language, “family” and “home” is the same word: jia. The convergence of these two concepts can perhaps explain why Chinese culture writ large has long been associated with family harmony in the collective imagination. The reality, of course, has never been so simple: the home has always been a site of contestation where social values are negotiated and reconfigured. Recent social changes have further widened the gap between what home ought to be and what it actually is. This roundtable seeks to examine the enactment of ideologies of home in everyday life, as well as the myriad ways in which people react or adjust when realities fall short of idealized expectations. Together, we ask a number of questions that critically assess the meanings and emotional valences of the concept of “home” as both physical space and as lived experience. What is home supposed to feel like, and how does one cope when these feelings cannot be found among family members? Can the aesthetic mood of home be reproduced in commercial spaces, in medical settings, between neighbors, or among strangers? What are the psychological effects of being denied a home, either by virtue of circumstance or as a result of damaged family relations? In societies where individuals are constrained, to varying degrees, by rigid expectations of kin relations, what possibilities exist for creating a home on one’s own terms? In our efforts to answer these questions, the participants in this roundtable will draw from their individual research projects to provide numerous insights from across the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Sonya Pritzker and Teresa Kuan illuminate how people in therapeutic environments re-conceptualize family relationships and idealized, gendered notions of family in the wake of China’s so-called “psycho-boom.” Emma An explores the fine line between care and control in families with autistic youths, arguing that the home can become a site of intimate surveillance wherein parents exclude their children from public life in order to protect them. Looking at how “home” can be re-imagined at the other end of the life course, Claudia Huang examines how changing attitudes about old age have brought about commensurate changes in how elders view the prospect of growing old in an eldercare institution rather than with their families. Finally, by revisiting Arthur and Margery Wolf’s previously unanalyzed field notes, Jing Xu offers a helpful historical corrective on assumptions about “the Chinese family” in general and the role of peer socialization among children in particular.

Home away from home: reconsidering expectations of the “Chinese family life”

There are over one hundred sixty thousand (>160,000) abandoned hard rock mines in the Western United States, and many of them are on Native American lands (Lewis, Hoover, and Mackenzie 2017). Worldwide there is a well-documented dialectical relationship between transnational mining corporations and local Indigenous communities. Stuart Kirsch claims that “mining companies and indigenous peoples regard each other as their greatest threat” (2014, 8). Numerous studies have been published on an array of environmental health effects from living near abandoned mine lands (AMLs), and abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) in particular. This problem becomes even more concerning in the “mineral age,” a term that indicates the global expansion and intensification of mineral resource extraction, and the social and environmental impacts that have occurred since the beginning of the twenty-first century (Jacka 2018). Given the scale and magnitude of the problem of AMLs and AUMs, and because this trend is accelerating, this session will focus on different manifestations of the mineral age in ethnographic detail, and account for deeper historical conditions that have contributed to this current moment of extraction. What is emergent or seemingly new, qualitatively different, about energy and mineral resource extraction in the last two decades, and what historical circumstances become relevant for understanding these situations? What lessons can be drawn from AMLs in our respective fields of study for a broader, international audience•Indigenous and non-Native communities around the world who have been impacted by and are responding to an increasing number of AMLs? There are different, often conflicting historical periodizations of the growth and development of industrial mining and metallurgy, which offer political coordinates of inquiry and intervention. Against the claims that tend to naturalize and normalize mining as something all civilizations have done•the actual bedrock underlying cultural epochs•we seek to describe the qualitative differences of late industrial extraction in the mineral age, and the dialectical relationship between settler-colonial regimes of mineral and energy resource extraction and Indigenous lives and livelihoods. This session will explore interdisciplinary possibilities for collaboration with environmental health scientists, Native and non-Native community partners, policy-makers, and regulatory agencies in co-designing “interventions” to attenuate environmental health risks and impacts from heavy metals exposures from AMLs. In this roundtable session, we will discuss the following themes at the intersection of political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), and critical Indigenous studies of settler colonialism: • Indigenous data sovereignty and research autonomy • Settler-colonial determinants of health • Toxic infrastructures of mineral and energy resource extraction • Social science collaboration in environmental health sciences • Critical multi-stakeholder analysis • Community-based participatory research (CBPR) • Tribal or traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) • Comparative epistemology and relational ontology • Decolonizing methodologies • Critical Indigenous STS and Native science • Ethnographic refusal and scalable scholarship

From Legacies of Extraction to Environmental Health Governance: Collaborative Research and Responses to the Impacts of Mining in Indigenous Communities

At a moment when economic inequality is ravaging the lives of people across the globe, anthropologists have an obligation to critically interrogate the processes through which financial worlds and futures are made. Who bears responsibility for the financial crises and coups that have devastated the lives of many, and significantly enriched an elite few? How can anthropological knowledge be used to not only bear witness to the making of financial futures, but also to challenge the claims upon which they are founded and the practices through which they are forged? Bringing together a diverse group of scholars working at both the graduate and post-graduate level, this roundtable panel seeks to address these questions. It engages scholarship in the anthropology of finance and the anthropology of the future to consider how futures, both collective and individual, are financed, and how finance, in turn, shapes imaginings and experiences of the future. By exploring the making of financial futures across a range of ethnographic contexts the panel asks: How does financial expertise become an organizing discourse that mediates people’s understandings of temporality, risk and possibility? How are prisms of truth and responsibility reconstituted by these emergent set of experts? How are financial figures, forecasts, and ratings discursively and ideologically deployed to generate "objective" forms of economic knowledge and financial "truth"? How does the construction of "objective" financial knowledge serve to deepen indebtedness and exacerbate inequality by asymmetrically assigning financial responsibilities? Collectively, the goal of this roundtable is two-fold. First, to illuminate the ideological and cultural underpinnings of what often appear as inviolable financial truths. And second, to demonstrate that anthropological knowledge can play a vital role in creating futures that are more equitable, heterogeneous and inclusive, rather than controlled by powerful self-serving financial elites.

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