Description:
Call for Papers for the 105th American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Annual Meeting, to be held November 15-19 in San Jose, CA:
Thresholds of Life
In a now familiar narrative, colonialism, governmentality, and science
introduce conceptions of identity that displace or destabilize prior
logics of personhood. Much discussed examples include the role of:
- censuses in disaggregating and reordering social actors into religious, racial
and ethnolinguistic categories
- treaties after World War I in constituting minorities out of the masses
displaced by the dissolution of empires and
- technologies in disseminating and mediating new transnational identities
among populations of migrating workers
Each of these developments permitted the founding of new and multiple
identities into which social actors could be interpolated or which they might
take up strategically. Or so we posit now that these new identities have
solidified into recognizable form.
Papers on this panel will return to moments of political interregnum in which
logics of personhood brushed against one another to yield an altogether
different conception of being-in-common. Emergent in these moments are
conceptions of personhood irreducible to either an entirely new form of identity
or the preceding logic of personhood that the new form presumably displaces.
The papers on this panel will situate the appearance of these conceptions of life
both historically and ethnographically, pointing toward the conditions of
possibility for these emergent if not fully formed conceptions of personhood.
What sorts of openings for thought did these historical moments rend, and what
questions hovered briefly in the air before these emergent conceptions of
personhood settled into socially intelligible identities?
Please contact Tom Asher with a 250 word abstract of
your proposed paper topic.
