Dear friends and colleagues,
Please circulate this Call for Panels for ASA 2018 (Oxford) within your networks. We have a great series of conference themes, and a brilliant range of keynote speakers including Ian Hodder, Caitlin DeSilvey and Mike Rowlands. 

The overall theme for the conference is "Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination". Within this overall theme there are four strands: Language and Imagination, Creative Bodies, Environmental Imaginations, and Transformation and Time.

Panels on any aspect of Archaeology or Anthropology which address the Conference Themes are welcomed. The Call for Panels closes on 26 February 2018.

There's more information on the conference website: https://www.theasa.org/conferences/asa18/ 

DH


ASA18: Re-Creating Anthropology: Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination
Oxford, 18-21 September 2018

The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth’s 2018 conference will be jointly hosted by the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) of the University of Oxford, including the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University. It will take place in Oxford, based in and around the Examination Schools, the High Street, Oxford, on 18–21 September 2018.

The conference invites participants from all areas of Anthropology and Archaeology, aiming to encourage debate as widely as possible, across socio-cultural, material, visual, biological, forensic, cognitive, evolutionary, and linguistic fields. It also welcomes participants from anthropology, archaeology, and museum studies associations, and will provide a forum to take forward the ASA's proposal for a UK Anthropology Network (UKAN).

One of the major debates within anthropology broadly defined is the question of how to bridge approaches primarily concerned with the social, and those primarily focused on the material, the physical, or the biological. Much recent anthropology, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, seeks to overcome artificial conceptual divisions, either by proposing new (often hybrid) ontologies or simply by pursuing problems that challenge conventional boundaries. ASA2018 aims to address this key question directly. If sociality, matter, and the imagination are reconsidered from multiple perspectives across the discipline, how might we renew and re-create anthropology? What kinds of theoretical, methodological, and ethical concerns are raised by this potential re-creation?  Working with a very broad definition of ‘the material’—potentially including linguistic, biological, genetic, neurological, environmental, and evolutionary factors—the conference aims to advance debates on sociality and matter, the imagination and creativity, and therefore on what it is to be human in a rapidly changing world.

Confirmed keynote and semi-plenary speakers include 
Melissa Leach (IDS, Sussex), Caitlin DeSilvey (Exeter), Mike Rowlands (UCL), Alice Street (Edinburgh), Anna Grimshaw(Emory), Alessandro Duranti (UCLA), and Rita Astuti (LSE). There will also be a debate on evolution and morality featuring Oliver Scott Curry (Oxford), Charles Stafford (LSE), Soumhya Venkatesan (Manchester), and Jo Cook (UCL). 

Ian Hodder (Stanford) will deliver the Firth Lecture on 'The Paradox of the Long Term: Human Evolution and Entanglement'. For the abstract, click here. Rita Astuti will deliver the closing keynote on 21 September. For the abstract, click here.

In addition to conference papers, participants from all fields of anthropology are encouraged to present work in a range of media including film, sound, performance, photography, and drawing. We also aim to include exhibitions, laboratories, and other experimental formats in the Pitt Rivers Museum and elsewhere. Contributions to the conference will be organized according to the following four themes:

Theme 1: Language and Imagination
Many philosophers argue that the imagination plays a fundamental role in the very conditions of possibility of thinking. Likewise, many anthropological approaches have assumed that without the works of imagination there would be no other forms of cultural work. Imagination underlies politics, ritual, materialities, language, and, of course, art and creativity. Imagination is one of the loci where anthropologies meet, and where serious dialogue must take place. From cognitivist sciences to the anthropology of art, of politics, of religions, of kinship, etc., understanding the capacity of humans (and perhaps non-human primates too) to create potential scenarios is a key part of what we find in the field and a key part of the representations we document in our writings. What are the effects of imagination in life and in anthropology? Other approaches might consider mind and language in their material manifestations. Social life and the environment work on and are shaped by humans and their languages. Local ideas of how languages and thought relate to the world may challenge academic theorization. Do we need new comparative approaches for the study of radical variation?

Theme 2: Creative Bodies
The human body has long been recognized as a site where the biological, social, and the material converge. Bodies are creative in the sense that they not only grow and reproduce other bodies, but through performances and gestures, they inscribe, manipulate, and communicate ethnicity and gender, health and sickness, vulnerability and resistance. At the same time, bodies remain sites for the production of inequality and alterity. Proliferating images represent and mediate bodily experiences in diverse ways, and bodies are increasingly mobile, distributed, and virtual. Furthermore, developments in technologies – whether applied to bodies before birth, in life, or after death – are recreating both human physicality and the ways in which it is possible to imagine it. We invite panels to explore questions relating to bodies, their materiality, and their imagined dimensions. How are imaginative processes grounded in embodied action, and how are bodies enmeshed in wider social and ecological relationships? How are shifting relations between the human and the non-human affecting bodies, and indeed redefining the 'human'?

Theme 3: Environmental Imaginations
Earlier generations of anthropologists tended to focus on human environmental adaptability in a wide range of ecosystems and climates. More recent anthropological research has instead prioritized the spatial possibilities afforded by deterritorialization and globalization at many scales. ‘Nature’, which has always functioned as a repository of social ideas and political values, is being recast through a multiplicity of global environmental change discourses. The landscapes that people inhabit embody forms of agency beyond full human control, and anthropologists are increasingly urged to engage in interdisciplinary work. What people actually mean or desire when they talk about stability and/or transformation has become much more contingent. Is environmental change limiting the human imagination, or are people using their imagination to adapt to the changing climate? Where weather extremes are already affecting livelihoods and ecological practices, what contests and transformations are they triggering? If place and mobility are mutually constitutive (mobility everywhere depends upon dwelling in specific places), what movements will take place on a rapidly changing earth, and what dwelling projects will succeed in an increasingly uncertain atmosphere? We invite contributions on the roles that ethnographic knowledge and anthropological imagination continue to play in an era bound to involve fraught politicized disputes about ways to live with environmental change.

Theme 4: Transformation and Time
How do sociality, matter, and the imagination transform over time? Whether addressing short- or long-term processes, anthropologists and archaeologists are confronted with questions relating to the temporal nature of the phenomena they analyse. As social relations form and change over time, how are these shifts registered and expressed in material terms? In what ways do material objects emerge, stabilise, and then disintegrate or re-form? And how does time figure in imaginative processes? In relation to this theme we welcome panels that explore temporalities and transformations in social life, material formations, and acts of imagining. How is the past reconstructed and the future predicted through material practices? What kinds of institutions promote change or aim to preserve the present? How do the political, ethical, and economic aspects of social, material, and imaginative transformations develop and play out?

Organising Committee

Jason Danely, Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of Japan, Oxford Brookes University
David Gellner, Professor of Social Anthropology, Head of Department, SAME (Chair)
Chris Gosden, Professor of European Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford
Elizabeth Hallam, Research Associate, SAME, and Editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Clare Harris, Professor of Visual Anthropology, SAME; and Curator for Asian Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum
Dan Hicks, Associate Professor in the School of Archaeology and Curator of Archaeology, Pitt Rivers Museum
Catherine Hill, Professor of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University
Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Anthropology, Oxford Brookes University
Laura Rival, Professor of Anthropology of Development, Oxford Department of International Development
Ramon Sarró, Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa, SAME
David Zeitlyn, Professor of Social Anthropology, SAME

https://www.theasa.org/conferences/asa18/cfpan.shtml

-- 
Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA
University of Oxford
http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/DH1.html 

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