The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held online and in-person in Toronto from November 15-19, 2023.
The HAR News editors are please to share a selection of panels that may be of interest to our readers. Other panels and additional details can be found in the preliminary program.
Wednesday, November 15th
Living with Ghosts in Transitional Times
Session Time: 2:15 PM to 4:00 PM
Session Type: Executive Oral Presentation Session – In-Person
Organizer: Rosanna Dent
Participants: Emma Kowal, Jennifer Brown, Jenny Davis, Trevor Engel, Rosanna Dent, Eden Medina, Vivete Garcia- Deister, Emma Kowal
Session Description: Times of transition attempt to make the present history. The last half-century has seen a plethora of transitions towards social infrastructures that are intended to benefit Black and Indigenous people, women, queer people, people living with disability, and other groups who those in power have historically considered less than human and subjected to violence of all kinds. In many societies, policies, laws, practices, and structures of authority have been remade and renewed in efforts to make the world less harmful. These efforts are always uneven and incomplete, beset with vulnerabilities and erasures. But even if social change were flawless, this would not avoid a larger problem: the past is often resistant to being left behind. This executive panel examines how the ghostly traces of the past exert their presence, often at the precise moment they are believed to have been left behind for good. We draw on a promiscuous range of accounts of haunting, from Derrida’s hauntology of ‘absent presences’, to Gordon’s ghosts of gendered and racialized violence that demand a ‘something to be done’, to Youngblood Henderson’s ‘postcolonial ghost dancing’ as a method of uncovering ongoing colonial practices. Settler colonies, in particular, abound with ghosts. So-called postcolonial societies that depend on the repression of the violent colonial past and the ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty make for constitutively uncanny places, at once homely and unhomely, settled and unsettled, familiar and strange. Ghosts and spirits are an everyday presence in many Indigenous communities, reflecting the porousness of the categories of human, non-human, land, self, living, dead, past, and future. In colonial times, some of these ghosts have become highly syncretic, providing resources for comprehending a confusing present. Liberal, multicultural, anti-racist and decolonial efforts to create more livable worlds are also rife with the ghosts of their equally well-meaning predecessors, including proponents of assimilation and eugenics. And objects of all kinds are liable to haunting, with museums a favorite haunt for ghosts. Papers in this session examine the ghosts of scientific and anthropological practice in varied contexts across the Americas, Europe, and Australia. We also consider the limits and possibilities of hauntological methodologies. When our fieldsites and archives contain ghosts of one kind or another, we must decide how to approach them. We can seek to understand their haunting presence in the lives of our interlocutors, or account for them directly as non-human actors in a pluriversal politics. Ghosts can also be teachers, showing us how to fashion accounts of the social that haunt existing disciplinary frameworks. Learning to live with ghosts is an imperative in worlds wracked by violent pasts and presents, and in transition to more just futures.
Thursday, November 16th
George Stocking Jr. Symposium in the History of Anthropology: Transitions, Transmissions, and Transformations in the History of Anthropology: Panel 1. Critical Engagements with Anthropology’s (De)Colonial Politics in the Mid-20th Century
Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division
Session Time: 10:15 AM to 12:00 PM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session
Organizer: Adrianna Link
Participants: Adrianna Link, Mindy Morgan, Nicholas Barron, Amber Zambelli, Patricia Matos, Pamela Stern, Adrianna Link, Robert Hancock
Session Description: The past decade has seen a series of critical and thoroughgoing engagements with the history of 20th c. anthropology and its current representation in the discipline, from the work of Ryan Cecil Jobson and Jafari Sinclaire Allen to the 2020 AAA Presidential Address by Akhil Gupta with Jessie Stoolman. These readings demonstrated both the ongoing relevance of historical understandings of the discipline and its representations and the ongoing frustration of each emerging generation with earlier approaches. Often parsed/presented as a concern with the decolonial and liberatory impulses of previously subject peoples and populations, these recent critical analyses also display a deep commitment to the discipline and optimism about its potential contributions to justice in its myriad forms in the 21st century. Sharing these concerns, the papers in the first of two George Stocking Symposium sessions engage with the theme of ‘transitions’ by reflecting on historical moments of change, crisis, and emergence within the discipline and their implications for the field’s politics and methods in the present. From a variety of perspectives, they contribute to a process of writing new histories of anthropology that embody a transition from ahistorical critique and narratives of discontinuity to ones that engage past approaches and/or their representations as foundational both for future research in the history of anthropology and for the training of future anthropologists.
George Stocking Jr. Symposium: Transitions, Transmissions, and Transformations in the History of Anthropology, Panel 2. Anthropology Beyond Anthropologists: ‘Other’ Actors and Structures in the History of Anthropology
Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division
Session Time: 2:00 PM to 3:45 PM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session
Organizer: Julia E. Rodriguez
Participants: Julia E. Rodriguez, Julia E. Rodriguez, Robert Launay, Amy Cox Hall, Christopher Heaney, Charlotte Williams, Francisco Diaz, Sebastián Gil-Riaño
Session Description: This, the second panel in the George Stocking Jr. Symposium, addresses the conference theme of ‘transitions’ in that it showcases new perspectives and a new generation of research in the History of Anthropology. Together the two panels contribute to efforts to decolonize methods in the history of anthropology, including a thoughtful consideration of the debate over the backlash to decolonial efforts in the scholarship. The Symposium aims to point towards recent scholarship that simultaneously recognizes the constructive parts of 20th Century anthropology while still being committed to critiquing and moving beyond European and colonial (and patriarchal) perspectives. Panel 2, ‘Anthropology Beyond Anthropologists: ‘Other’ Actors and Structures in the History of Anthropology,’ brings together panelists with creative scholarship that decenters anthropologists as the sole, or central, figures of knowledge production. This work is part of a new conversation about previously unacknowledged actors and material had agency were crucial to the outcomes claimed by anthropologists (e.g. Bruchac; Wilner). The panelists’ research encompasses both non-anthropologist actors (such as Indigenous peoples and texts; government officials) and structural factors (e.g. colonialism, laws, racism, land) as sources of insight for the history of anthropology.
The Import and Impact of Documentary Work: Filmmaking, Community Building, and Afro-Diasporic Celebrations
Reviewed by: Association of Black Anthropologists
Session Time: 2:00 PM to 3:45 PM
Session Type: Roundtable/Town Hall – In-Person Organizer: Alexis Holloway
Participants: Sheila Walker, Jemima Pierre, Jasmine Blanks Jones, Saudi Garcia, Alexis Holloway, Sheila Walker, Lee D Baker
Session Description: How can film be used alongside traditional ethnography to reach broader audiences and communicate ideas that are difficult to translate through the written word? What qualities of film make it a useful tool for representing scattered communities and diasporic relationships? What can anthropology bring to filmic approaches to produce contextualized, ethical, and audio-visually stunning works that help to bridge the perceived gap between scholarship and the arts? Dr. Sheila Walker, a prolific anthropologist, feminist scholar, and filmmaker has been producing works, both written and visual, that function to tell the often obscured stories from the incredibly diverse and widespread African diaspora. Throughout her career, Dr. Walker has been committed to both understanding and teaching others about the African diaspora, as she has travelled to much of Africa and the Diaspora, participating in cultural events and lecturing to a wide array of audiences. When asked about the themes of her varied forms of scholarship, Dr. Walker has described her work as ‘a cultural continuum from Africa to the Americas, diasporic creations of new forms based on African knowledge, and commonalities that challenge colonial boundaries and definitions.’ This roundtable will center on the work of Dr. Walker, specifically highlighting her most recent film, Familiar Faces/Unexpected Places: A Global African Diaspora (2018) which underscores the many ways that Africans and Afrodescendants imported their own cultural, environmental, and technological expertise to these new worlds to which they were forcibly brought. In our discussion of Familiar Faces/Unexpected Places, we will analyze the visual motifs that signal a history of resilience and innovation, rather than subjection and persecution. As Dr. Walker’s films assert, creativity and triumph are important and critical forms of resistance. We will also underscore the significance of Black participation in documentary film production, both in front of and behind the camera. Lee Baker’s deep involvement in the successful 2023 film, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space; Saudi Garcia’s use of raw footage to examine the often incongruous paces of activism, academia, and the filmmaking industry; and Alexis Holloway’s mobilization of film to challenge the obfuscating forces of the racial imaginary in classical music performance, all speak to the potential of media as a form of solidarity work and public-facing educational opportunities. Jasmine Blanks Jones understands ethnographic film as ‘a powerful pedagogical tool for working with Black World youth to lift their voices, stories and aspirations to wider audiences and crucial as an archival form of the intellectual work being done in communities that is iterative and ever-changing, often resisting written forms.’ Furthermore, Jemima Pierre and Krystal Strong have found innovative and creative means by which they incorporate film into their pedagogical approaches and ethnographic praxes. Our roundtable celebrates the diaspora as it simultaneously exemplifies it. Coming from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds, we argue for the import of film into the anthropological canon, and emphasize the impact that film from the diaspora has, and continues to influence the field of anthropology.
The Many (After)Lives of Benjamin Lee Whorf
Reviewed by: Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Session Time: 2:00 PM to 3:45 PM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session Organizer: Hannah McElgunn
Participants: Anthony Webster, Regna Darnell, John Leavitt, Hannah McElgunn, Sean O’Neill, Morgan Siewert, Anthony Webster
Session Description: Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) is both a charismatic and enigmatic presence within the field of linguistic anthropology. He is perhaps most well-known for his theorization of temporality in Hopi versus ‘Standard Average European’ (SAE) languages. His comparison between Hopi and English, and between other Indigenous languages and SAE, has captured both popular and scholarly imaginations, leading to debates over the validity of ‘Whorfianism’. This label refers to a stance on the relationship between language and thought that is inspired by and attributed to Whorf. Yet, ironically, an interest in Whorfianism has overtaken careful consideration of Whorf himself, often moving us further from the questions he was asking, his methodologies, and the kinds of data he sought to create (see Darnell 2006; Lee 1996, 2021; Lucy 1992; Silverstein 2000 for critique). This panel revisits Whorf’s life and work, focusing especially on the kinds of questions that Whorfianism tends to overlook. We ask: what kinds of cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual influences shaped Whorf’s conceptualization of language? How did he approach fieldwork, and what kind of working relationships did he develop with research partners? What types of description and analysis did he experiment with? How did Whorf approach pedagogy and how can we best teach Whorf’s work today? In reconsidering Whorf in this manner, we expose some of the key assumptions and motivations of contemporary linguistic anthropology, while illuminating the methodological, pedagogical, and conceptual paths that our discipline might yet follow.
Fieldwork Precarity: Anthropological Work in Transition
Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division
Session Time: 4:15 PM to 6:00 PM
Session Type: Roundtable/Town Hall – In-Person
Organizer: Jieun Cho
Participants: Summer Steenberg, Ariana Avila, Tarini Bedi, Louisa Lombard, Summer Steenberg, Ana Ramirez, Nana Charlene Elfreda Adubea Toa-Kwapong, Sophia Goodfriend, Brendane Tynes, Folasewa Olatunde
Session Description: This roundtable brings together scholars and practitioners to critically examine the institutionalization of fieldwork and its implications in reproducing precarious subjects. Fieldwork is a cornerstone of anthropological research, providing a means for producing critical knowledge and engaging with diverse communities. However, the work of ‘immersing’ oneself in cultures is increasingly discussed in relation to issues of precarity, including financial strains, institutional pressures, and personal safety concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the difficulties and limitations of conducting fieldwork to the forefront especially for anthropologists whose research relies heavily on being physically present in the field. While the pandemic has sparked important discussions around the precarity of fieldwork, this roundtable seeks to broaden the conversation by examining how fieldwork precarity intersects with social difference, including race, gender, class, disability, and nationality. Critically engaging the norms of fieldwork(er), it aims to disrupt ideas of ‘going back to normal’ and start to reimagine precarious encounters as transitioning moments for what fieldwork may become as a way of doing anthropology in and beyond academia. Drawing on personal experiences and critical analysis, we will discuss the ways in which fieldwork can both reproduce and challenge social hierarchies, and more broadly, the role of fieldwork in shaping our understanding of diverse cultures, communities, and the kind of anthropological work we can do ourselves.
Why Aren’t Anthropologists Writing Bestsellers? Writing, Books, and Anthropology’s Public Voice in the New Millennium
Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division
Session Time: 4:15 PM to 6:00 PM
Session Type: Roundtable/Town Hall – In-Person
Organizer: Susan Brownell
Participants: Susan Brownell, Niko Besnier, Dylan Montanari, Noelle Stout, Chip Colwell, Mary Gray, Roy Grinker
Session Description: Session Description: As anthropologists gather in Toronto to discuss how anthropology can ‘rise to face our current condition’ in this period of transitions, it is a good moment to reflect on the decline in the discipline’s public presence over the past decades. If this is a moment for embracing transitions amidst uncertainty, then the discipline should assess its failures and seek out a new trajectory. There was a time in the early twentieth century when, as Charles H. King argues in Gods of the Upper Air (2019), ‘a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century’ by introducing into popular culture the idea that, despite our differences, humanity is one undivided thing. His book about the Boasians was a New York Times bestseller, yet King is a political scientist and not an anthropologist – like most of the authors who have, in recent decades, seized public attention for anthropology’s contributions to understanding the human condition (such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari). David Kertzer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is perhaps the most accoladed anthropologist in recent years – but for works on popes and anti- Semitism, in the discipline of history. If one walks along the bookshelves at a major chain bookstore, one sees many books by historians who are university faculty, but few by anthropologists – in particular by cultural anthropologists, even in relatively marketable fields like China studies. There is often no ‘anthropology’ section, so it is hard to find the few books that are there. The days of Margaret Mead are long gone, with consequences for the viability of the discipline. Amidst budget cuts, anthropology departments are being eliminated by administrators and fellow faculty members who either don’t understand what we do, or who know what we do but do not respect it. Anthropological insights should be more valuable than ever at this historical moment when hatred based on race, gender, religion, nation, and more, is on the rise. But neither politicians, nor media, nor the general public seek us out for answers. Clearly, the times are changing and the discipline has not changed with them. ‘Why aren’t anthropologists writing bestsellers?’ Taking anthropological writing and publishing as a starting point, the roundtable will explore broader questions about the place of the discipline in academe and in the public sphere. The speakers assemble a wide range of experience – both inside and outside the academy – in writing (including award-winning trade books), publishing, and/or engagement with mass media. Susan Brownell has given hundreds of interviews to media on the topic of China and Olympic Games. Niko Besnier is former Editor-in-Chief of American Ethnologist and has written and lectured extensively on anthropological writing. Dylan Montanari is Associate Editor for The University of Chicago Press lists in anthropology and history. Noelle Stout is a research faculty at Apple University and author of Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class. Chip Colwell is Editor-in-Chief of Sapiens and author of Plundered Skulls & Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture. Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. Roy Richard Grinker is author of Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness.
Friday, November 17th
Between Professional Stranger and Auto-Ethnographer: Degrees of Belonging in Anthropological Research, Part 1
Reviewed by: Association of Senior Anthropologists
Session Time: 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM
Session Type: Oral Presentation In-Person
Organizer: Jim Weil
Chair: William P. Mitchell
Presenters: Jim Weil, Jack Glazier, Lourdes Gutierrez Nájera, Francine Saillant, Phyllis Pasariello
Discussant: Susan Trencher
Session description: The title of Michael Agar’s The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography implies a research focus on the so-called “other.” In contrast, panelists in this session provide examples of ways anthropologists have considered the extent to which they bridge or efface the dichotomy between “us” and “them” in fieldwork. How have relationships between the extremes of complete stranger and auto-ethnographic subject developed? Have involvements intensified along a continuum during their careers through ongoing research? …long-term residence? …marriage or other kinship arrangements? …local employment? …post-retirement engagements? This is especially relevant for senior anthropologists who have experienced transitionsin their own professional approaches and witnessed profound changes in the discipline.
Nowadays it may be more common to do research “at home” and less common in settings which, in one way or another, can be considered remote. Kirin Narayan (1993) raises challenging issues in what it means to be a “native anthropologist.” Where anthropologists share an essential or existential identity with a local population, does a necessary element of professional detachment estrange them from their own neighborhoods, organizations, or other interaction sites and reference groups? Are we doing auto-ethnography when we debate over what it means to be an anthropologist, distinguishing our own identity within the discipline from identities we don’t share with all of our colleagues (Goldschmidt 1977; Trencher 2000).
Over many decades, moreover, the shift of emphasis from holistic community studies to ethnographies with local manifestations of global problems has countered the exoticism of past orientations and practices (MacClancy 2019). Cultural hybridity makes us members of multiple groups in widening circles of inclusiveness. Might our personal backgrounds and choices of research sites have become less crucial now than a professional stance combining reflexivity, self-effacement, and ethical commitment? In what ways have anthropologists developed their personal identity to resist and overcome the compartmentalization of the social contexts in which they live and work? (Bolles 1985). Many have carried out research in two or more contrasting settings (Gottlieb 2012). Accordingly, in an ideal world, what additional benefits can be expected when those who so choose have opportunities to draw from at least one fieldwork project in a community (or equivalent setting) they define as their own, and in at least one other setting as unfamiliar as possible?
Between Professional Stranger and Auto-Ethnographer: Degrees of Belonging in Anthropological Research, Part 2
Reviewed by: Association of Senior Anthropologists
Session Time: 10:15 AM – 12:45 PM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session
Organizer: Jim Weil
Chair: William P. Mitchell
Presenters: Rena Lederman, Fadwa El Guindi, Yohko Tsuji, Moshe Shokeid, Myrdene Anderson
Discussant: Virginia R. Dominguez
ANTHROPOLOGY IS DYING FROM A THOUSAND CUTS
Reviewed by: Association of Senior Anthropologists
Session Time: 2:00 PM to 3:45 PM
Session Type: Roundtable/Town Hall – In- Person
Organizer: Alice Kehoe
Participants: Alice Kehoe, Noel Dyck, Rick Feinberg, Yolanda Moses, Evin Rodkey
Session Description: Franz Boas established Anthropology as a discipline with four subfields, reflecting: humans as biological organisms – genus Homo within Order Primates, human societies as culturally diversified, the archaeological past, linguistics. Anthropology’s strength is its recognition that we cannot understand human behavior without taking into account, our physical nature derived from ancestors, the patterning of behaviors through imitating and learning from other people, the influence of histories, and our unique capacity for expression and communication in words. Anthropology is rooted in the fundamental theoretical position that the four specialties are different facets of what it means to be human. Democracy––rule by the people––is natural in selection for gregarious living, while it is challenged by cultural patterns supported by aspects of our evolutionary heritage such as lust, hoarding, fear of strangers and bonding for defense. When the broad foundation of American anthropology is gutted by academic cuts and restructuring into capitalist enterprises exploiting possessive individualism, we lose not only our unique understanding of the empirical reality of the human organism Homo sapiens, but also opportunities to awaken our compatriots to the humane values integral to our discipline, transitioning from ‘silos’ to solidarity. Our professional associations should work to increase community, technical and tribal colleges’ outreach to all residents, and to support courses in anthropology that begin with a four-field Introductory course understood to be relevant to every person, regardless of their employment strategies, because everyone is a Homo sapiens. All our professional organizations are doing outreach. In numbers there is strength.
Activist Methodologies for the Future: Engaged Pedagogy and Research in Anthropology
Reviewed by: Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA) Session Time: 4:15 PM to 6:00 PM
Session Type: Roundtable/Town Hall – In- Person
Organizer: Karine Vanthuyne
Participants: Larisa Kurtovic, Nelli Sargsyan, Marie-Dominik Langlois, Marie Lily Jiapizian, Megan Blanche, Gabrielle Richards, Veldon Coburn
Session Description: North American activist anthropological engagements are not new. They go back to the early 20th century when Franz Boas challenged the scientific racism of Victorian anthropology to insist on racial equality – albeit in ways that reinforced the racial common sense (Baker 2021). The neoliberal restructuring of academia, which rewards fast scholarship and publication, however, stands at odds with the practice of socially responsible research which requires the time and space for nurturing relationships. The privatization of research funding, the shift to underpaid, devalued academic labor, combined with the emphasis on individual advancement over and against community concerns (Navarro 2017) have all contributed to increasingly extractivist ethnographic research practices (Burman 2018). To be sure, more recent calls to decolonize education, which gathered momentum in Canada following the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’ Call to Action in 2015, have prompted university administration and faculty to revisit their relationship with the Indigenous communities whose territories their institutions occupy. In their strategic plans, most Canadian post- secondary institutions have expressed more tangible commitments to Indigenous peoples (Raffoul et al. 2022). Yet, as scholars of liberal states’ policies of recognition and inclusion have already pointed out (e.g., Povinelli 2002; Coulthard 2014), these developments seem to be more about neutralizing the critique of higher education institutions’ deeply ingrained coloniality than about radically transforming existing teaching and research practices (Gaudry and Lorenz 2018). Conditionally included, Indigenous knowledges are to remain on the sidelines, or be forced into existing academic disciplines, where they can be conscripted to reinforce institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2012), instead of disrupting Euro- Canadian philosophies’ claim to universality (Batiste 2013). In this roundtable, we ask: In an era of dominating market logics, extractivist research practices, and enduring settler colonial material and symbolic violence, what does it mean to place emphasis on knowledge co-creation with the communities within which we conduct our research, so as to reimagine researcher accountability as an ethic and a practice? Is it possible to leverage knowledge co-production practices that strive not only to document or theorize, but to also affect conditions on the ground, in (dare we dream) transformative ways? This roundtable gathers professors and students who have since 2022 participated in the University of Otawa’s Laboratory for Engaged Research and the adjacent pedagogical innovation project ‘Activist Research Workshop.’ The aim of this laboratory is to bring together uOtawa faculty, and graduate students who are interested in the kinds of scholarly research that seek to actively collaborate with movements focused on issues of social justice-including racial, Indigenous, migrant and climate justice, but also issues like policing and carceral violence, and water rights and protections, among others. Together, we will reflect on the openings and challenges each of us met, as we co-labored from a diversity of positionalities to deepen our understanding of engaged and activist methodologies.
Saturday, November 18th
Mentoring Activity: Compiling Fragments of an Anthropological Memoir
Reviewed by: Association of Senior Anthropologists
Session Time: 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM
Session Type: Special Event
Organizer: Jim Weil
Presenters: Maria Cattell, Paul Stoller, Maria Vesperi, Diego Vigil, Marion Berghahn, Jim Wei
Description: This activity is intended for anthropologists who have done some autobiographical writing and seek guidance in preparing partial or full memoirs that position their work in the broader contexts of the places and times in which they have lived. Efforts might focus on one or both of the following: (1) settings, events, and experiences, beginning in childhood, that shaped choices leading to an anthropological career; (2) continuing influences of social positioning in personal and public life, and how these affect opportunities and choices in professional practice. One objective is to develop a shared understanding of possibilities for synthesizing ethnography, ethnohistory, and autobiography in a hybrid genre which could be called auto-ethnohistory.
The event is led by senior colleagues who promote engaged writing, whether as a genre that complements conventional anthropological reportage and analysis or as a preferred mode of ethnography. Embracing subjectivity encourages imagination and storytelling (Behar 2022, Stoller 2023) and clarifies insider/outsider distinctions (Harrison 1995). Relevant formulations include auto/ethnography (Reed-Danahay 1977), the ethnographic self (Collins and Gallinat 2010), anthropological autobiography (Okely and Callaway 1992), self-narrative (Chang 2008), and social memory (Climo and Cattell 2002). Recent refinements in epistemology and representation (Zenker and Kumoll 2010) are considered, along with innovations in writing forms, techniques, and strategies (Waterston and Vesperi 2011; Wulff 2016).
The convenors comment on brief readings of exemplary autobiographical passages, then respond to questions from other attendees. The mentoring proceeds with breakout groups or one-on-one conversations to help colleagues draw from their own lives in selecting scenarios to portray in analytic vignettes. Likely take-aways for participants include reintegration of neglected memories, reevaluation of past purposes, and recognition of shifts and growth, which may lead to new directions in ongoing career development.
Critical assessments of anthropology have made it increasingly difficult to ignore the historical matrix that uniquely channels the interests, explanations, interpretations, and goals of each practitioner through the sciences, the humanities, or both together. Memoir writing, while promising personal insights on its own terms, can address perplexing issues involving anthropological reflexivity in approaches, encounters, and responses that remain controversial within the discipline and beyond.
Revisiting Algonquian Myths and Beyond: New Approaches and New Challenges for Indigenous Mythologies (1)
Reviewed by: Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA) Session Time: 8:00 AM to 9:45AM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session
Organizer: Émile Duchesne
Participants: Laurent JÉRÔME, Robert Crepeau, Marie-Pierre Bousquet, Émile Duchesne, Clint Westman, Philippe Lévesque, Robert Brightman
Session Description: Algonquian myths have been painstakingly collected and scrutinized by generations of anthropologists. Boasian and other culturalist anthropologists left us considerable and consistent description of Algonquian lifeways from the early 20th century, as well as an important corpus of myths. Algonquianist anthropology also gave birth, through Alfred Irving Hallowell’s work, to the ontology concepts so present today in the discipline. In francophone anthropology, Lévi-Straussian structuralism also left its mark on Algonquianist research through the work of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie amérindienne, which conducted intensive research among the Innu between the 1970s and 1990s. In the past few decades, anthropology of Indigenous cosmologies has again been revitalized by new approaches such as animism, perspectivism, semiotics and the so-called ontological turn. These analytical tools allow us to gain new understandings of the vast and dense cosmology of Algonquian peoples. In the first part, our panel seeks to renew anthropology’s long engagement with Algonquian mythologies by addressing new topics and using new approaches. How can we envision perspectivist arrangements, which seem so present in Algonquian mythologies? What is a good storyteller according to Algonquian standards and how are their speeches performative events? How does Algonquian mythology engage with contemporary issues such as politics, economics and Christianity? How do Algonquian mythologies echo other Indigenous mythologies in the Americas or elsewhere? In the second part, our panel will envision these questions under a comparative light by asking specialists of other cultural areas to engage with the Algonquian material presented in the first part. This comparative scope will enable a better understanding of the intertwined influence of storytelling and experience in Indigenous cosmologies.
Revisiting Algonquian Myths and Beyond: New Approaches and New Challenges for Indigenous Mythologies (2)
Reviewed by: Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA) Session Time: 10:15 AM to 12:00 PM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session
Organizer: Émile Duchesne
Participants: Laurent JÉRÔME, Adrian Tanner, Robert Crepeau, Rosilene Pereira, Frederic Laugrand
Session Description: Algonquian myths have been painstakingly collected and scrutinized by generations of anthropologists. Boasian and other culturalist anthropologists left us considerable and consistent description of Algonquian lifeways from the early 20th century, as well as an important corpus of myths. Algonquianist anthropology also gave birth, through Alfred Irving Hallowell’s work, to the ontology concepts so present today in the discipline. In francophone anthropology, Lévi-straussian structuralism also left its mark on Algonquianist research through the work of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie amérindienne, which conducted intensive research among the Innu between the 1970s and 1990s. In the past few decades, anthropology of Indigenous cosmologies has again been revitalized by new approaches such as animism, perspectivism, semiotics and the so-called ontological turn. These analytical tools allow us to gain new understandings of the vast and dense cosmology of Algonquian peoples. In the first part, our panel seeks to renew anthropology’s long engagement with Algonquian mythologies by addressing new topics and using new approaches. How can we envision perspectivist arrangements, which seem so present in Algonquian mythologies? What is a good storyteller according to Algonquian standards and how are their speeches performative events? How does Algonquian mythology engage with contemporary issues such as politics, economics and Christianity? How do Algonquian mythologies echo other Indigenous mythologies in the Americas or elsewhere? In the second part, our panel will envision these questions under a comparative light by asking specialists of other cultural areas to engage with the Algonquian material presented in the first part. This comparative scope will enable a better understanding of the intertwined influence of storytelling and experience in Indigenous cosmologies.
Transitional Objects: Creating and Using Anthropological Archives
Type: Roundtable/Town Hall, In-Person
Time: 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: TMCC, 713 A
Organizer: Nancy Lutkehaus, USC
Participants: Joshua Bell, Reighan Gillam, Jennifer Cool, Stephanie Spray, Alice Apley, Yasmin Moll, Nancy Lutkehaus, Xilin Liu, El Whittingham
Description: To what extent, and in what ways-literal or metaphorical- might an archive be considered a ‘transitional object” in the Winnicottian psychological sense of the term? This roundtable will discuss the various implications of archives as transitional objects through a focus on the creation of an anthropological archives at the University of Southern California based on visual and textual materials from the Center for Visual Anthropology. This archives, which began with anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s material from her Academy Award winning film, “Number Our Days” about elderly Jewish holocaust survivors in Venice, California. It spans a 46-year period of ethnographic filmmaking at USC and includes the visual materials of Timothy Asch, Paul Bohannon, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. The Center for Visual Anthropology is currently at a point of inflection and has been reenvisioned as the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts, which will support advanced works of interdisciplinary media art in moving image and sound. This transition is the catalyst for discussions about how ethnographic archives can become “living archives” used by a variety of individuals including students, scholars, artists, and community members concerned with the present rather than simply as historical documentation of the past. The roundtable discussion will expand upon this question with comparative information from individuals associated with visual archives at the USC Center for Visual Anthropology, Anthropology Film Archives at the Smithsonian, the non-profit Documentary Educational Resources, and a local community archives in Los Angeles associated with the Heart and Soul Center, a non-profit video/media studio located in South Central Los Angeles. The roundtable will also address the timely issue of the decolonization of archives as well as questions about the future of the genre of ethnographic film, taking up Anna Grimshaw’s recent 2022 query about its status today’s world of multimodality. To what extent are earlier ethnographic films an historical resource for new forms of multimedia creations? What are new directions that experimental and ethnographic media is taking today and what role might anthropological archives play in their creation in the future?
Fieldwork Technologies: Transitional Histories of Ethnographic Mediation
Type: Oral Presentation Session
Time: 4:15 PM – 6:00 PM
Location: TMCC, 206 D
Organizer: Matthew Watson
Participants: Jennifer Hsieh, Stefan Helmreich, Natasha Schull, Jennifer Hsieh, Nick Seaver, Matthew Watson, Robyn Taylor-Neu
Description: Mythologies of ethnographic research – past and present – often construct fieldwork as a series of unmediated intersubjective encounters. But particular tools routinely enable, shape, and frame ethnographers’ field experiences. This panel rethinks the mediation of anthropologists’ embodied sensory, technical, and epistemic labors through fine-grained attention to historically-specific fieldwork technologies. The panel threads together research on past and present fieldwork technologies in order to reframe constructions of the field’s past and rethink the contemporary techno-politics of extended ethnographic embodiment. How might attention to technologies aid us to recompose histories of fieldwork and reimagine the technical, ethical, and epistemic contours of ethnography today? How have anthropologists and their technologies uniquely constructed ethnographic fieldwork in specific times and places? We address these questions by tracking how technologies affect the sensorial, political, and ethical shapes of ethnographic labor across fieldwork, interpretation, and exposition. Panelists examine how tool-enabled recording and textualization are not just objects for researchers’ use. Rather, they produce ethnographic insights and modes of theorization – in cases when tools are deployed as intended, and in cases when they aren’t. Panelists ask: how capricious, surprising captures of audio field recordings interrupt and redirect constructions of data and ethnography; how our material and digital filing practices condition what counts as felicitous conceptualization, theory-building, and argumentation; how the emergence of social scientific mainframe computer programming complicated the laboratory-field distinction in modernist ethnography’s anxious epistemic culture; and how filmic animation technologies in contemporary Berlin reattune our ethnographic senses of sitedness. This assemblage of papers reimagines ethnography’s practical, aesthetic, and epistemic forms – from the mid-twentieth century to the present – as “transitional histories” of mediation. Taking up the conference theme, we offer a collective meditation on these histories as an act of “tarrying in [technological] transition.” We suggest that reading ethnography as a complex of transitional histories hones our collective sense of the field’s historicity and inspires intricate works of play with the shapes of our ethnographic techne.
Sunday, November 19th
The Good Way, the Good People: Reflecting on (Forgotten) People, Histories, Relationships, Places and Methods (Part 1)
Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division Session Time: 8:00 AM to 9:45 AM
Session Type: Oral Presentation
Session Organizer: Sarah Moritz
Participants: Sarah Moritz, Joshua Smith, Joshua Smith, David Dinwoodie, Liesl Gambold, Sebastian Braun
Session Description: Drawing from our individual and our collaborative endeavors and life projects, we reflect candidly on the transitional contexts of anthropologists’ decolonial, action anthropological and collaborative inquiries in connection with the ways these have informed our theories, writing, relationships, and institutional engagements to do work ‘in a good way’. We ask, what was, is and can be the role of timely actioned, engaged, and/or relational anthropology during these uncertain and turbulent times? What can our trans-disciplinary past and especially some of its forgotten, ostracized, ignored, subjugated, yet influential ancestors teach us about critical and enduring legacies for the present and future? We reflect critically on mentors, Elders, peers, and teachers who offered transitional gateways, portals, and re-imaginings of anti-colonial, decolonized, and alternative anthropologies through which we are, in turn, inspired to consider real transitional tools towards ethical, reciprocal, and powerful alliances and approaches for addressing the immense contemporary challenges facing anthropology now. By invoking gifted people and ideas who already transitioned or provided alternative transitional paths towards a decolonized anthropology, we aim to identify radical pathways and alternatives that many of us routinely pass over, ignore, refuse to see. We offer a set of protocols, principles, and insights to inspire the ghosts, contemporaries, and future generations of those interested in working together through transitional contexts of critical decolonial reception histories, reconciliation, climate change, education, and social justice. (Part 1)
The Good Way, the Good People: Reflecting on (Forgotten) People, Histories, Relationships, Places and Methods (Part 2)
Reviewed by: General Anthropology Division
Session Time: 10:15 AM to 12:00 PM
Session Type: Oral Presentation Session
Organizer: Sarah Moritz
Participants: Joshua Smith, Sarah Moritz, David Anderson, Regna Darnell, Sarah Moritz, Andie Palmer, Project Filus Team Pamela Block, Davie Donaldson, David Anderson, Robert Patrick Wishart
Session Description: Drawing from our individual and our collaborative endeavors and life projects, we reflect candidly on the transitional contexts of anthropologists’ decolonial, action anthropological and collaborative inquiries in connection with the ways these have informed our theories, writing, relationships, and institutional engagements to do work ‘in a good way’. We ask, what was, is and can be the role of timely actioned, engaged, and/or relational anthropology during these uncertain and turbulent times? What can our trans-disciplinary past and especially some of its forgotten, ostracized, ignored, subjugated, yet influential ancestors teach us about critical and enduring legacies for the present and future? We reflect critically on mentors, Elders, peers, and teachers who offered transitional gateways, portals, and re-imaginings of anti-colonial, decolonized, and alternative anthropologies through which we are, in turn, inspired to consider real transitional tools towards ethical, reciprocal, and powerful alliances and approaches for addressing the immense contemporary challenges facing anthropology now. By invoking gifted people and ideas who already transitioned or provided alternative transitional paths towards a decolonized anthropology, we aim to identify radical pathways and alternatives that many of us routinely pass over, ignore, refuse to see. We offer a set of protocols, principles, and insights to inspire the ghosts, contemporaries, and future generations of those interested in working together through transitional contexts of critical decolonial reception histories, reconciliation, climate change, education, and social justice. Part 2 builds directly, organically and practically on the foundational work done in the first session (please see Part 1) and provides evocative ethnographic, grassroots and community cases and examples of a ‘good way/good people’ research approach.
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