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Dear all,

I need one more paper for the panel "Anthropological temporalities: the method and ontology of multi-temporal ethnography" that I am putting together for the AAA meetings this November. The panel abstract is below. Let me know asap if any of you is interested - the deadline is this Sunday the 15th of April. 

Best wishes

Nikolai
_ _
Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Division of Social Anthropology
Department of Archaeology and Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF
United Kingdom
tel. (+44)1223-334599
direct line (+44)1223-763083
e-mail: [log in to unmask]

AAA meeting San-Francisco November 2012

Anthropological temporalities: the method and ontology of multi-temporal ethnography

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge)

In recent years, anthropology has critically and productively engaged with its legacy of spatially localized society or culture as the object of study. Anthropology reassessed its lasting, and often implicit, ontological association of culture with area (the famously assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture) and a related methodological association of ethnographic fieldwork with singular and stable location. This panel takes this critique further by asking what are assumptions about time that have enabled both the classic 20th century anthropology as well as its more recent revision. What are the notions of temporal repetition and difference that underscore classic and contemporary ethnography? What are historicist assumptions in discussions about the ‘end’ of the era of bounded entities and the ‘wake’ of globalization? Do we inevitably slip into understanding time as a value-neutral measure of these processes? What is taken out of time when we historicize? What are temporalities that underscore, and constitute, the anthropological concerns with the contemporary, the emergent, and the future? What are ontological as well as methodological implications of recognition that temporalities of phenomena that we study are multiple — that they constitute HETEROCHRONY? What are the advantages as well as predicaments of the notion of “multi-temporal ethnography,” which might be proposed by analogy with the “multi-sited” one? The notion of location that has been productively rethought as a matter of being relationally SITUATED, rather that simply “found” in geographical space — specifically, situated in the context of power relations. By analogy with this, how can we conceive this situated-ness AS TIME, rather than simply something happening IN TIME?

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