December 10, 2007
CFP: How Is Anthropology Going? An Inquiry into Movement, Mode and Method in the Contemporary World.
CFP: How Is Anthropology Going? An Inquiry into Movement, Mode and Method in the Contemporary World.
This panel asks a misleadingly simple question: how is anthropology going? The prime assumption of such an inquiry is that there exists, today, a diversity of anthropological valences and that such diversity is a productive element of the discipline. Beyond that, however, we intend to ask about the various possible modes of contemporary anthropology—the diverse manner by which different anthropologies move. By asking this, we mean to initiate inquiries in several further directions: Although it has long been accepted by various Derridean anthropologies that differences between domains of inquiry are in themselves productive of analyses, we want to ask, within that framework how anthropologies can remain open, or vital; in other words, how are various anthropologies made possible, so that they can exist within a diversity of approaches and loci? In shifting the topic of anthropological methodology in such a way, we are particularly interested in the motion that is enabled at the intersection of two classic formulations of the political: aesthetic persuasion and ethical orientation; how are people, places things, etc.—including anthropological text and theory—put into motion?
We imagine at least three different ways in which panel papers might engage the above question: 1) Through papers that document the forms of movement—be they of an ontological (people, things, ideas, images) rhetorical (e.g., genres of persuasion) nature; 2) Other papers might ask how such movement is made possible, or even necessary, in the contemporary world. Such papers might go beyond documentation towards a questioning of the various orientations available within the contemporary anthropological toolkit and, in so doing, essay an assessment of the discipline as such (the second sense of the phrase “how is it going’?); 3) Yet another approach to the above question might consider the very fact that anthropologists are asking such questions at this particular moment and attempt to explore what this fact might tell us about the contemporary world.
Please submit paper abstracts of 250 words or less and title to Karpiak@berkeley.edu by Thursday, December 13th 2007.