Contemporary concerns about truth and responsibility seem to index an instability in the cultural production of reality itself. Intersecting technopolitical and biosocial upheavals are disrupting the conditions under which the real is constituted. Across various domains, the procedures underpinning the real and the claims it warrants are being both exposed and remade: from the rise of inflationary media (Castillo and Egginton 2016) and the virtual in technology and biomedicine (Boellstorff 2008; Whitehead and Wesch 2012) to the nonhuman ontologies of scientific practice (Barad 2007) and indigenous multinatural perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 2015; cf. Todd 2016). At a time when the ways of producing the 'reality effect’ in social life are changing, the panel seeks to explore the shifting parameters of the real through the lens of ethnography. It also aims to examine how our discipline, with its moorings in the concrete, practical and experience-near, itself engages and evokes the notion of ‘what is.' Reality is a longstanding key concern for ethnography, in terms of both its objects and method, its narrative styles and the very stakes of the anthropological encounter. It is also, and increasingly, a troubled and troubling term. We contend that the real has a history of its own. A history, on the one hand, of the specific modes of its social production and the slippages of reality’s grip at moments of crises or around edges of epistemes; on the other hand, a history of the ways reality has been approached and rendered in anthropology, including in phenomenology, thick description, constructivism, or experimental methods of research and writing that affirm or challenge ethnography’s own ‘realism’: the authority that comes with having ‘been there’ in that real that ethnographic description purports to immerse the reader in, yet cannot fully capture (Jackson 2005; Stewart 2007, cf. Barthes 1986). Today reality appears at once more malleable and exerting an ever firmer hold. As with austerity imposed by economic realities with a simultaneous liberalization of finance (Guyer and Neiburg 2019), the workings of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), or the social phenomenon of gaslighting (Sweet 2019), reality is elusive yet unrelenting. So, too, is the ‘new reality’ emerging before us with the covid-19 pandemic and the forms of its mitigation. The panel suggests that the production of reality, in social life as in writing, is intrinsically bound up with relations of power and the specific structurings of the worlds we inhabit, study, and seek to build (van de Port 2011; cf. Yurchak 2006). As such, reality is precisely a matter of not only truth and responsibility but also of the imagination. Panelists contemplate and address this dimension as central to what the ‘really real’ may mean in life as in ethnographic practice.

Enumerating Economic Reality

After Reality: Ethnography and the Pursuit of the Real, Part 1

technical paper

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.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“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.

Stuart McLean

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Presentations

Enumerating Economic Reality