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AAA meeting in Montréal - Panel Call for Papers

Working title: Territorial phantom pains and other cartographic anxieties: Revisiting the body/nation simile

Taking the theme of this year’s AAA in its most literal sense, this panel proposes to examine the notions of ‘Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies’ as they are left on the national body. By revisiting the common trope of the nation-as-body, this panel will explore what happens when a lack of fit intervenes between the physical geographical extent of the nation and the mental map held by its inhabitants.

Such a disconnect becomes especially visible when a nation loses part of its territory. Recently ‘lost’ territories, no longer included within the national body, remain nonetheless part of a previous national incarnation. As such, they frequently draw national sentiments and affect, producing what can be labeled ‘phantom pains’.

My paper’s ethnography will focus on China’s northern border with Russia and Mongolia. While the Chinese government has resolved most of its territorial disputes with these countries, a large swathe of the Siberian north remains tied, in the Chinese national psyche, to China’s dynastic past. These ‘phantom pains’ find an echo in Mongolia and the Russian Far East province where anxieties about Chinese territorial expansion are prevalent.

This panel hopes to include papers looking at similar intersections between the national and physical bodies in various ethnographic contexts. For instance, disconnects can also occur when a nation finds itself in rapid expansion. As the borders of the nation extend, taking in more and more of the outside, and clouding the divide between self and other, the question then becomes ‘what happens to the mental map of that nation’s citizens?’

*** Contributions from psychological anthropologists especially welcome ***


Contact Franck Billé ([log in to unmask]) for more information or to submit an abstract by 31 March 2011.

Dr Franck Billé
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RF

Tel: +44 7846  140088
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