[URBANTH-L]AAA 2009 CFP The Shifting Borders of Mexican Anthropology

[Gilberto Rosas]

Please forward widely.

CALL FOR PAPERS
for the American Anthropological Association's annual conference at the
Philadelphia Marriott, December 2-6, 2009

The Shifting Borders of Mexican Anthropology

As the country that inspired E.B. Tylor’s science, the discipline of
anthropology in Mexico would seem to be inextricably coupled to questions of
imperialism, globalization, or related extra-territorial power-knowledge
relations. Indeed, the discipline proved central in the formation of the
post-revolutionary state, evidenced in the elevation and cultivation of new
political subjects, a cohesive, modern, national politics of mestizaje, a
common political citizenship that putatively indigenizes modernity and
modernizes retrograde indigeneities. Cognizant of the discipline's close
association with modern governmentalities of national and transnational
dimensions, many anthropologists have documented historically specific
techniques of racial, class, and gendered exclusions. Others have sought to
document and analyze everyday struggles, widespread mobilizations, and
emergent subjectivities. These approaches emerge from specific critiques of
the discipline both from within Mexico and beyond.

The scholars on this panel revisit the tensions of anthropological knowledge
production in Mexico.  We seek a wide-range of innovative papers exploring
the shifting politics of anthropological knowledge production about this
country and its people from the revolutionary moment through the Calderon
government and across disciplinary and international borders. What new
subjects of analysis and locations become unveiled under distinct if
simultaneous regimes of power-knowledge relations? How do migrant and other
post-territorial subjects complicate and contribute to the politics of
knowledge production? How do new ethnographies of Mexico speak to the new or
renewed configurations of power and new political imaginaries? What do
contemporary ethnographies of Mexico tell us about the shifting nature of
power and knowledge, global racial formations, hemispheric knowledges,
sovereign powers, empires and its impotencies, contestations, subject
formation, agency, and resistance?

Dr. Ana Alonso of the University of Arizona will be the discussant.

If interested, please send an abstract by March 22 to

Gilberto Rosas
Postdoctoral Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor
Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
and Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago

Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
and Latina/o Studies Program
University of Illinois

(773) 834-8736
grosas at uchicago.edu