We welcome papers from for the AAA 2014 conference to be held in Washington
D.C., December 3-7, 2014. Please send abstracts to Enkelejda Sula-Raxhimi (
[log in to unmask]) and Hanna Kienzler ([log in to unmask])
no later than April 7th, 2014.
*Title: Playing the numbers game: Shaping nationalistic discourses and
actions *
This panel seeks to explore and untangle the complex politics of numbers in
order to show how political "facts" are produced, national identities
shaped, and governance of communities and territories justified.
Since the creation of nation-states, numerous examples have shown how
numbers are generated and used by nationalist discourses and actions to
justify the domination and/or the occupation of whoever is perceived to be
the Other through bureaucratic procedures, fighting, land grabbing, and
attempted annihilation of histories in the name of the majority. Such
numbers have often been the motivation behind and the subject of political
violence. Collected through national surveys and other instruments, they
are then converted into national statistics, numeric products that are
always the subject of negotiation or dispute, ever changing and shifting,
in relation to their respective purpose. At the same time, these
numbers areimportant instruments in the hands of the state in that
they serve as a
basis for shaping identity as categories that "are continuously
agglomerated, recombined, intermixed, and recorded (but the politically
powerful identity category always leads the list)" (Anderson 2006:
164). Conversely,
the "small numbers" (Appadurai 2006) of the minorities fear such politics
while being, at the same time, feared by the same politics. This tension
between the politics of numbers and the reaction of individuals towards it
becomes the key to unlock and understand the underlying rationale behind
numbers and the way it is used to mobilize political discourses and actions
towards governed populations.
To shed light on how these complex tensions unfold in different national
contexts, this panel asks: how does the politics of numbers operate
concretely on the ground? How do numbers play in favour of certain groups
and/or at the detriment of others? How do the different groups use them to
make their voices heard and their histories taken into account?
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