[URBANTH-L] CFP AAA 2009 - The fictions of kinship: Relatedness, mobility and global capital

[mathangi at mail.utexas.edu]

Call for Papers

Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA),
Dec 2-6, 2009; Philadelphia

Proposed Panel
The fictions of kinship: Relatedness, mobility and global capital

Organizer:
Mathangi Krishnamurthy, The University of Texas at Austin

Discussant:
Kaushik Ghosh, Assistant Professor (Anthropology),
The University of Texas at Austin

	This panel seeks to engage with kinship studies to specifically ask  
how networks of kin and relatedness have been activated, created or  
reconfigured in the context of national, transnational and global  
movements of people, work and communication. In the process of  
movement, what happens to kinship ties as prescribed by birth,  
tradition, culture and nation? How do people form networks that  
replicate, extend or mimic kin networks within new forms of capital  
and sociality? What are the ends of kinship as a heuristic, and what  
are its limitations? How do we understand both the changing nature of  
kin relations as well as their continued centrality to relational  
selves in movement?  Even as in many parts of the world, family and  
concurrent relationships continue to inform the ways in which people  
form relational selves and notions of history and boundedness, how do  
we place this in the context of migration, displacement and mobility?

	Kinship studies have resurfaced in the twenty first century, as a way  
to examine, nuance and critique biological and cultural assumptions  
that underline and shape everyday experiences of kinship. Intersecting  
with anthropological examinations of new reproductive and genetic  
technologies, kinship has been rekindled as a way to understand  
complex legal, moral and cultural formations of family and  
relatedness. Today, complex social formations underline how individual  
subjects experience being related. In this hyper mobile set of  
signifying relations, what does family encompass and include or  
exclude? What work does kin and the experiences of being part of  
various and varied overlapping, contrasting and connected networks of  
biological, fictive and adopted kin networks accomplish? Given that  
subjects are beset by accelerated change and increasingly decentered  
worlds, how does kinship continue to inform anthropology?

	We invite papers from scholars working through the questions of  
mobility and relatedness in order to understand how kinship studies  
can lend texture and particularity to questions of globalization,  
neoliberalism and urbanization.

(1) Movements, mobility and kin

(2) Migration, geographical displacement and familial continuity

(3) Technology and kin relations

(4) Activation of kin relationships in transnational formations

(5) Media discourses on new kin relations

(6) Fading forms of kin relations and fictive kinship in conditions of  
hyper mobility

(7) Kinship in the context of violence, shattered social structures  
and conflict

Please send an abstract of not more than 250 words and a brief CV to  
Mathangi Krishnamurthy by Monday, March 9 2009  
(mathangi at mail.utexas.edu).

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Mathangi Krishnamurthy,
Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of Anthropology,
The University of Texas at Austin
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