******************************************************
* http://www.anthropologymatters.com *
* A postgraduate project comprising online journal, *
* online discussions, teaching and research resources *
* and international contacts directory. *
******************************************************
We wish to add a few participants to the panel described below. If
the topic is of interest, please email me ASAP at [log in to unmask]
Many thanks!
**Privates and Counterprivates**
Proposed panel for AAA 2008, submitting to Society for Cultural
Anthropology
Organizers:
Gretchen Pfeil (Univ of Chicago)
Thomas Strong (University of Helsinki)
The world today appears to be inhabited and animated by more and more
new kinds of mediated association -- "publics" -- whether virtual,
scientific, financial, religious, or retail. Anthropologists have
rushed into these spaces with descriptive and analytic gusto yielding
manifold accounts of emerging "worlds," where people associate in new
and ever more visible and audible ways, "publics" ever more public
than before. Anthropological attention has focused especially on kinds
of association in which complementary forms of technological and
social innovation challenge conventional theoretical wisdom (about the
secular, the public, and the modern, to name a few). These new
theorizations of different publics, the public sphere, and the nature
of publicity lead us to ask, what's happening in private? What is
'the private'? Do new understandings of publics and publicity demand a
rethinking of the realm of the private, the domestic, the discreet,
the secret? Does the persistent expansion of the public (or the
multiplication of publics and resistant counterpublics) and the
visible (from transnational YouTube networks to urban fishbowl condos
with floor-to-ceiling glass walls) elicit complementary forms of
discretion, coding, and concealment? How might we theoretically
distinguish some forms of sociality and group-belonging which exist in
private? We thus seek to examine social relations constituted not in
broadcast appeals to public recognition, but through a restriction of
access or through explicitly bounded practices of circulation (of
knowledge, communication, or goods). Contemporary anthropological
accounts of the public require us to rethink the private. In this
panel we suggest that a new theorization of the private might see it
as something more than the negative image of the public, as more than
what is left in the shrinking shadows of the illumination of ever
expanding publics. Has ethnographic enthusiasm for documenting new
publics itself concealed a teleological bias, in which the ‘social’ is
equated with the ‘public’? These papers challenge the assumption that
the point of contemporary creativity in social life is always another
public, imagined perhaps as resistive or ‘counter.’ We attend to
relations in private or to relations whose impetus lies not in
reflexively open mediation but in restrictive coding and discretion.
How do certain forms of sociality depend upon the limit and
restriction of the circulation of knowledge? How do such social forms
challenge existing models of "publics" and "the private"?
Papers:
Megan Clark (University of Chicago) // Privates in Turkish, Intimates
in Kurdish: Obscenity at the Bilingual Margins of the Kurdish Movement
in Turkey.
Erin Debenport (University of Chicago) // Private Notice: Negotiating
Secrecy in the Public Use of a Pueblo Language
Paul Manning (Trent U) // Your girlfriend is your ‘sworn brother’:
Public idioms for intimate relationships in mountain Georgia.
Lilith Mahmud (Harvard / UC Irvine) // TBA
Sasha Newell (University of Illinois) // Performative Privates and the
Public Secret of Success: Bluffing Your Way to the Top in Abidjan's
Underbelly
Sarah Pinto (Tufts University) // On Dissolution: Interiority at the
Intersection of Marriage and Mental Illness in India
Gretchen Pfeil (Univ of Chicago) // Two Nudie Dances and a (Gay)
Wedding: Kinship, Circulation, and Moral Outrage in Dakar
Thomas Strong (Univ of Helsinki) // Infection as a Social Relation:
'Serosorting' in San Francisco
Discussant(s):
James Boon (Princeton)
Thomas Strong, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Researcher
The CoE in Global Governance Research
P.O. Box 4 (Yliopistonkatu 3)
00014 University of Helsinki
*************************************************************
* Anthropology-Matters Mailing List *
* To join this list or to look at the archived previous *
* messages visit: *
* http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML *
* If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all *
* those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: *
* [log in to unmask] *
* *
* Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new *
* CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com *
* an international directory of anthropology researchers *
***************************************************************
|