******* Apologies for cross posting *******
Dear colleagues,
Please find below our call for papers for a Panel provisionally titled Suspension of Suspicion at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, December 3-7 2014.
Please send your abstract (max 250 words) by March 31st to Anne Lavanchy ([log in to unmask]).
Thank you for circulating this call for papers among your colleagues and in your networks.
We look forward to receiving your proposals,
With our best wishes,
David, Valerio and Anne
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Suspension of suspicion
Panel proposal for 113 AAA annual meeting, Washington DC, December 3–7, 2014
Convenors:
David Bozzini (The Graduate Center CUNY, New York, USA)
Anne Lavanchy (University of Applied Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland)
Valerio Simoni, (Lisbon University Institute, Lisbon, Portugal)
Discussant:
Tobias Kelly (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Short abstract
The indeterminate nature of suspicion and its ambiguous relations to “truth” have seldom been a focus of our discipline. Yet, suspicion is a driving force generating complex articulations between beliefs and doubts, certitudes and anxieties, verisimilitudes and uncertainties. By drawing suspicion and its suspension under the same analytical lens, and by focusing our attention on the key juncture between the two, we wish to highlight the dynamic ways in which opaque and contentious realities are made intelligible, and ‘facts’ and ‘certainties’ produced. Conversely, we are also interested in how relatively stable and unproblematized conditions are made uncertain and suspicious by the proliferation of competing narratives and an excess of information.
Long abstract
The indeterminate nature of suspicion and its ambiguous relations to “truth” have seldom been a focus of our discipline. Yet, in social worlds characterized by expertise and evidence-based politics, suspicion – related to surveillance, abuses or fraud, amongst others as well as the different modalities of its suspension – are a powerful driving force, generating complex articulations between beliefs and doubts, secrecy and revelations, certitudes and anxieties, verisimilitudes and uncertainties. Such ambiguities affect research dealing with asylum claims, surveillance practices, the persecution of dissidents, indigenous authenticity, biogenetics and emerging regimes of relatedness, gossip and witchcraft accusations, economic malpractices, conjugal infidelity.
The range of situations in which suspicion operates traverse juridical, economic, religious, and political arenas, and seep into the most intimate realms of people’s everyday life, bringing to the fore specific configurations of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. Particularly interesting are the critical moments and turning points when suspicion is suspended to become certitude or conviction, and the changing regimes of reality it generates: witchcraft hunt, rejection of asylum claims, the designation of spies. By drawing suspicion and its suspension under the same analytical lens, and by focusing our attention on the key juncture between the two, we wish to highlight the dynamic ways in which opaque and contentious realities are made intelligible, and ‘facts’ and ‘certainties’ produced. Conversely, we are also interested in how relatively stable and unproblematized conditions are made uncertain and suspicious by the proliferation of competing narratives and an excess of information.
The dynamic between knowing and not knowing bears social consequences but also affects the production of anthropological knowledge. This resonates in our ethnographies and questions the ways we trust research participants, how we build verisimilitude on the basis of their accounts. What repercussions have suspicion and its suspension on our analysis? What happens when confusion, doubts and suspicions shape the social field we try to account for? What can we know about a situation, when nobody really seems to know what is going on? What sort of knowledge can anthropologists produce when suspicion and scepticism take hold of the research field?
This panel welcomes contributions drawing on ethnographic practices in contexts characterised by suspicion and questioning the dynamics of knowledge and ignorance, regimes of truth, half-truths and beliefs, intimate convictions and their material effects. We are particularly interested in ethnographically grounded explorations that can illuminate not only the ‘why’, ‘when’, and ‘how’ of suspicions, but more specifically the mechanisms that lead to their suspensions or towards an oscillation between the two: Which actors and agencies intervene in the process? What are its temporal dimensions, and to which extent is a new state of affairs achieved? How do the shifts from suspicion to its suspension, and vice versa, affect the lives of the protagonists involved, and their relationships with the institutional instances and public discourses that intervene in the process? How are power relations reconfigured along the way? How do emotions and affects inform suspicion and its suspension, and what kind of moral and emotional configurations do these dynamics foster? Which subject formations do suspicion and its suspension afford and encourage, and which ones do they silence and foreclose?
________________________________________________
Anne Lavanchy
Professeure HES-SO // Genčve
University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland
HETS - 28, Prévost-Martin. Case postale 80
1211 Genčve 4
+4122 388.94.69
[log in to unmask]
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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