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Dear list members, 

Please find below the call for papers for a panel on "resources and global exchange" during the German Anthropological Association (GAA-DGV) conference in Vienna (14 - 17 September 2011). The deadline for submissions will be 

11 March 2011.

Best regards,
Andrea Behrends





30. Spheres of Exchange Unlimited: Global Resources and Commodities in the Emergence of New Orders

 

Andrea Behrends and Nikolaus Schareika with the collaboration of Sung-Joon Park 

 

The trajectories of things that link societies and cultures across the globe have recently changed again and quite fundamentally so. Natural resources like crude oil and high technologies like pharmaceuticals have attained new values to a number of, partly new, actors. Now they are about to entwine these actors into new sorts and reciprocities of exchange. In doing this they spur the rise of new significations, expectations and discourses among the parties that are connected through them. And this in turn, may animate the quake of established orders and the emergence of new ones.

This panel argues that the global flow of natural resources, commodities, and services is indispensable in understanding the creation and maintenance of social order. The production, circulation, and use of oil, diamonds, gold, kitchenware, pharmaceuticals, and weapons reveal the contingencies and cultural specificities that speak to the emergence of new orders. This seems to be particularly visible in fragile contexts, where a comparative perspective helps to address the dynamics that resources and commodities can unfold. The growing importance of poor countries in global regimes of trade and governance moreover invites to rethink theories of power, inequalities and justice in these emerging orders.

Take for instance oil in Africa, a much-desired resource, which promises high returns, but requires high investments. While few international actors normally reach their desired margins from oil extraction, the new revenues also create desires among the populations of African countries – which more often than not remain unfulfilled. New orders are created not only by the actual production of oil and the inflow of cash, but also by various significations and expectations attributed to the resource. These may turn out to conform to the often quoted “resource curse” with higher possibility of insurgencies, longer-lasting dictatorship and an increased investment into „security‟. But they do, however, cause forms of creative adaptation to powerful regimes of trade that shape new and competing orders.

This panel invites to explore a broad set of questions, empirical cases, and theories on the relationship between resources and commodities in the creation of new orders. How are modes of extracting resources, the production of goods, and use of commodities entangled with new orders? Which dynamics and practices of trade make these emerging orders visible? What is in actual sense, given and returned? Which reciprocities are evoked? What is gained or lost and thus becomes an interesting object of study? Which methods do we need in order to analyze large-scale processes of trade and the establishment of new geopolitical connections? How does this focus relate to classic themes in anthropology with its many disciplines? How can a fresh look at things and orders inform methodological and theoretical approaches in development theory, political anthropology, and global studies?

Possible themes:

Global and local histories of resources, commodities, and technologies; Following things in ethnographies of oil, gold, pharmaceuticals, cell phones, etc.; Anthropological perspectives on “state”, order, and resources; The political economy of global trade and exchange; Creativity and adaptation in the creation of new orders; Technologies, strategies, practices of ordering and re-ordering; Co-production of social and natural orders in health, development practice, global markets; Performativity of things and devices in emerging global markets.

 

Dr. Andrea Behrends

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Dr. Andrea Behrends | Seminar for Social Anthropology | Martin Luther University D-06099 Halle, Germany | Phone +49-345-5524196 | Fax +49-345-5527326 | http://www.ethnologie.uni-halle.de/personal/dr_andrea_behrends/ |
http://www.eth.mpg.de/~behrends









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