AAA 2020 CfP
Difference, wonder, and surprise in anthropology beyond the “savage slot”
This panel aims to discuss the place of difference, surprise, and wonder in anthropological epistemology beyond the “savage slot” (Trouillot 2003). What has been the place of difference, surprise, and wonder in what Ortner (2016) calls the “dark anthropology” which studies power, domination, inequality, and oppression, or in the so-called “anthropologies of the good” that explore good life, happiness, morality, ethics, as well as activism, critique, and resistance? How do we learn through wonder, surprise, and difference (which are presumably necessary elements of anthropological epistemology) without Othering our interlocutors? How do we study anthropologically without attempting to translate the Other into the grammars and vocabularies of the Western Europe/Global North?
It has become commonplace to describe the late-twentieth-century-anthropological-turn towards “doing anthropology at home” or “auto anthropology”, as a move from “making the strange familiar” to “making the familiar strange”. This very formulation reinforces narrow understandings of the familiar and the strange even in the moment that it attempts to subvert them. That which is familiar is, in many ways, the taken-for-granted modernist knowledge practice of anthropology generated in the North and the West that still exerts a hegemonic position in relation to how anthropology is taught and anthropologists are trained across the globe. In this way, anthropology remains understood, primarily, a study of the Other, whether this is a geo-politically and/or socio-culturally generated concept. How and where anthropologists find difference, surprise and wonder beyond this narrow focus on the Other of Western Europe/the Global North still needs to be addressed.
The panel is open for contributions, whether primarily theoretical, polemical or ethnographic, that discuss the place of wonder, surprise, and difference in anthropological studies. It may not be so much, in Spivak’s terms, of whether the subaltern can speak but, rather, how postsocialist Europe (the Global East) and the post-colonial South (the Global South) can be a source not only of ethnographic knowledge but of anthropological theory. How can the East and the South be rendered legible in ways that do not reproduce practices of Othering? How can “the domain of speakability” (Bilić) be enhanced in anthropological research by authors living and/or working outside of the Global North? Whilst we welcome contributions from anywhere in the world, taking into account that already in 1972, Gloria Marshall wrote that “The anthropological approach is decidedly Euro-centric and it is time for the discipline to own up to this fact and to do something about it”, we especially welcome reflections on anthropological knowledge practices from the Global East and the Global South, and specific examples of ways of engaging with difference in research and writing practices.
If you are interested, please get in touch with Paul Stubbs (pstubbs@eizg.hr) and Carna Brkovic (carna.brkovic@uni-goettingen.de) as soon as possible