[URBANTH-L]CFP: Tsantsa special issue: Anthropology of Poverty

[Angela Jancius]

Call for Papers
Tsantsa: Dossier 11
- Articles libres - Recherches en cours - Call for Pictures - Compte-rendu

Tsantsa, annual journal of the Swiss Ethnological Society, will publish a
special issue on the anthropology of poverty in the fall of 2006. Tsantsa is
an anonymous peer-review journal.

Anthropological studies of poverty: definitions, systems, interactions and
the question of reciprocity

How is poverty defined, both by the people who live it and by those who
attempt to eradicate it?  What are the relations between what we call "emic"
definitions of poverty and the critical perspective that anthropologists are
supposed to adopt?  What are the implicit logics of categorization that we
can observe inscribed within systems of assistance and welfare provision?
How do those responsible for welfare programs formulate the difference
between poverty and precariousness?  And anthropologists?  And how do these
different sets of social actors handle such notions as "the poverty
threshold", "fundamental needs", "the living wage", "vulnerability", etc?
As for researchers, to what definitions of social "exclusion" and
"integration" do their analyses of people in poverty lead them?

This Call for Papers seeks field based analyses in Euro-American or «
exotic » settings that document both the State-based systems of welfare
provision (public assistance, public health programs, job-training and
workfare programs) and non- or para-State systems of aide (associations,
charitable organizations, solidarity networks and North-South linkages).  We
will be particularly interested in tracing the ways in which welfare and
public assistance programs are currently being transformed through a
rhetoric of « participation » in which givers and receivers of assistance
are thought of in terms of reciprocity and « responsbilisation ».  What
kinds of relationships between State social workers and aide beneficiaries
ensue; what forms of resistance, control and negotiations develop?
Questions of inequality and power relations are clearly central to this
inquiry.


Interested constributors should send résumés of 5000 bytes (2 pp.) and a
short biographical note by September 30 2005, to:
webmaster at seg-sse.ch (mention: Tsantsa 11 / call for papers poverty).
Accepted articles will be due on February 15 2006.

For more information about Tsantsa and the Swiss Ethnological Society,
please visit our website at
http://www.seg-sse.ch