[URBANTH-L]economics & morality, Call for Papers

[kate browne]

Hello fellow SUNTA members,

Please consider submitting an abstract for the 2006 Society for 
Economic Anthropology conference next spring. The theme is Economics 
and Morality, a topic that is bursting with promise for a great 
meeting. Read the Call for Papers and other information below. --Kate 
Browne, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State 
University

CALL FOR PAPERS
2006 SEA Meetings
April 21-23, 2006
Ventura County, California

Economics and Morality

Kate Browne & Lynne Milgram, organizers

The Society for Economic Anthropology seeks proposals for papers and 
poster
presentations for our 2006 annual meetings, April 21-23, 2006 at 
California
State University, Channel Islands on the theme: Economics and Morality.
Deadline for abstracts: OCTOBER 1, 2005.

The SEA meetings provide a rare opportunity for a focused program of
presentations with time for critical discussion in a convivial 
intellectual
setting. Approximately 15 papers are selected from abstracts for a 
program
that allows 20 minutes for presentation followed by 20 minutes for
discussion in a single plenary session over two days; 20 to 30 
additional
abstracts will be selected for a special poster session. Each SEA 
conference
also produces a book on the same theme. Presenting a paper in the 
plenary
session is a commitment that you are willing to have your work 
considered
for inclusion in this volume. Papers developed from poster 
presentations may
also be considered for the volume.

MEETING THEME: Morality refers to a code of conduct based on shared
principles about what is good and right behavior and values, and what is
not. When moral meanings intersect changing economic realities, economic
anthropologists are ideally positioned to investigate the product of 
these
intersections. For the 2006 SEA meeting, we are inviting
ethnographically-grounded papers that engage the following issues:  how
everyday economic activities are conceptualized in moral terms, how 
local
and global institutions, enterprises and social movements develop moral
claims and package them for consumption, how moralities are challenged,
reformed, and newly indexed, and how moral choices impact 
stratification by
class, ethnic groups, gender, sexualities, and nations. As the possible
range of categories below suggests, research relevant to this topic 
spans
all subfields of anthropology and will hopefully attract scholars from 
other
social sciences and the humanities as well:

1. Strategies for Defining and Investigating Morality in Economic Life
Emphasis on methods for demarcating moral aspects of economic values and
practice over space and time, and for decoding its variability at the 
level
of individuals, local communities, and across societies. Concerns 
related to
moral relativism and fieldwork dilemmas.

2. Conceptualizing Moral Frameworks in Economic Practice
Emphasis on theoretical constructs to distinguish morality from ethics, 
to
frame the emergence, fragmentation, and shifts in moral understandings, 
and
to outline an anthropology of morality and economics.

3. Moral Claims and Contradictions in the Global Economy
Discourses and practices that underlie neoliberal reform and its 
impacts,
new social movements (fair trade, new religious movements, human and 
animal
rights movements, labor movements, environmental movements), and 
increasing
commodification of new terrain (body parts, expired drugs, toxic waste) 
and
of prisons, war, etc.

4. Who Owns the Past? Indigenous and Western Conflicts and Claims
Competing moral claims on bones (NAGPRA), on museum artifacts, and
intellectual property (native crops, medicinal herbs, etc).

5. Who Cheats and Why? The Moral Terms of Economic Deviance
Practices and understandings of cheating, undeclared economic activity.
pilfering, petty theft.

6. What they were Thinking? Moral and Material Intersections of Past
Societies
Understandings of moral codes embedded in landscapes, built 
environments,
material culture, and political transformations.

DEADLINE: OCTOBER 1, 2005.  Please send your 500-word abstract for a 
paper or poster to both Kate Browne and Lynne Milgram.
kate.browne at colostate.edu and lmilgram at faculty.ocad.ca.
Kate Browne, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University, 
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-1787. Lynne Milgram, Faculty of Liberal 
Studies,
Ontario College of Art and Design, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, ON, 
Canada,
M5T 1W1.

THE SITE: The meetings will take place in beautiful Ventura County,
California, 1.5 hours north of Los Angeles, where opportunities are
available for hiking, kayaking, snorkeling, boat cruises and visiting
wildlife and wildflower sanctuaries. A Friday afternoon poster session 
and
evening reception will be held on the campus of California State 
University
Channel Islands, the newest addition to the CSU system. Nestled in the
foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains and built as a WPA project, the
mission revival buildings enclose 35 separate courtyards, each uniquely
decorated with hand-painted tiles, amid vast lawns and mature pepper 
and jacaranda trees.

**********************************
Katherine E. Browne
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1787
970-491-5813
kate.browne at colostate.edu
**********************************