[URBANTH-L]aaa panel call for paper posting request
Amanda Snellinger
ats35 at cornell.edu
Wed Mar 26 12:11:50 EDT 2008
Can you please post the following message:
If anyone would be interested in participating in the following
panel, we have a spot or two left. Those interested, please send me
an email as soon as you can and we would need your abstract by this
Saturday, March 29th so that we can appropriately frame the panel
abstract around all the contributing papers. ---Thanks, Amanda
Snellinger(ats35 at cornell.edu)
Panel Description:
Representations of communities in a language of social demographics
are a familiar enough thing. Systems of enumerating populations along
lines of ethnic, national, and religious composition, lines of
economic status and mobility, lines of social transition and
violence, etc., both justify and shape all kinds of large projects.
It'd be hard to imagine in this day and age techniques for producing
national policies, international development schemes, business
feasibility studies (and so on) that didn't rely on census bureaus
and statisticians. Few people would deny the incredibly powerful
influence that the study of demographics exerts at a macro level,
producing and instantiating categorical boundaries that --
practically speaking -- have a monopoly on legitimate knowledge in
state and economic institutions. These are positivist epistemologies
that have grown up in tandem with the ascendence of political
economics in, say, the last 150 years. They are moreover often
exactly the frames of knowledge to which anthropological
representations try provide an alternative.
I think it's fair to say that the majority of social anthropology is
at least agnostic and at most hostile to positivist descriptions of
the social world, preferring instead a framework that takes
categories of knowledge as context-specific and largely
untranslatable from one sphere to another without considerable
justification about why such a re-application is warranted. This gets
characterized by anthropology's critics as a rejection of truth and
science in favor of an uneasy faith in relativity, but a more
sympathetic reading would say that anthropology regards social facts
as existing across an ontological break with the material world,
i.e., that symbolic interactions get to operate according to rules
that are undetermined by an ostensibly larger and universal reality.
Having a masterly understanding of the properties of wood doesn't
make a carpenter an expert at chess, so to speak, because even though
a chessboard might be made out of wood, the rules of the game have
nothing to do with the physical traits of the pieces. Anthropology
has tended to maintain the width of this gap with pick-axes and
shovels, something I'm not necessarily opposed to lest we all turn
into sociologists, but it'd be interesting to think about what kind
of social forms exist at precisely this boundary between positivism
and symbolic relativity, where two mutually irreconcilable forms of
knowledge bump into each other.
On the ground, of course, irreconcilable category paradigms are
constantly reconciled by groups of people who must move between them.
So such here. All the papers in this panel deal with groups of people
that shift between multiple frameworks of self-identification. Rather
than sit around and mutter about why any one framework is more
representative than another, which would just be another name for
identity politics however sophisticated, we're interested in figuring
out what kinds of social dynamics are in play as people circulate
between different contexts of recognition, what kinds of meta-
categorical specificities are to be seen in a world of regimented
categorical generalisms. This offers, I think, an interesting out
from the feud between the disambiguating tendencies of the
structuralists and the radical embrace of ambiguity by post-
modernism. As much as anthropologists are generally tired of that old
battle, I don't think we've every really escaped the weight it puts
on our brains. Moreover, I think will allow us to take positivist
analytics seriously, something that's important considering just how
damn influential they are, without relegating them to "over there
with the electrons and gravitational bodies" (or, worse, just
translating it into the social world as a site to witness "resistance
to power").
Amanda Snellinger
Ph.D. Candidate
Anthropology Department
Cornell University
ats35 at cornell.edu
"Scientists have suggested that certain hypothetical properties of
space-time, predicted by certain “theories of everything” and thought
to be undetectable by currently achievable experimental means, might
have already influenced experiments, but without anyone noticing."
—Harpers, December 2006 pg 96
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