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Call for Papers
We are seeking one or two people to join our 2011 AAA panel (as presenters) -- please could you send abstracts (max. 250 words) to [log in to unmask] by Monday 4th April. Many thanks!
Organizer: Gemma John, Manchester University.
The Creativity of Concealment
We are in an era in which the negation of difference is key to political and social conduct. Attention to ‘sameness’ as opposed to ‘difference’ appears to be shaping the kinds of claims to property, rights, and personhood we make as, for example, demand grows for access to anything from ‘nature’ to ‘culture’, now re-described as ‘the commons’. Contemporary ideals of democratic governance devolve power to individual citizens, businesses, and local government conceived as equal and autonomous, whilst global access to information legislation stipulates that official information held by Government should be distributed with attention to recipients’ sameness rather than their differences. At the same time individualism, enterprise, and right to privacy are framed, not in terms of difference, but people’s equal capacity suggesting we are the same in our individuality—what is instead called into question is the amount of individualism we seek to express.
Rather than focusing on the traces, tidemarks, and legacies that distinguish people, disciplines, places, environments and objects, this panel seeks to explore the effects of concealing the very traces we as anthropologists seek to read. What kind of persons and social forms are produced when the evidential marks of diverse relations, motivations, and interests are concealed? What kind of capacities, momentums, and objectives are revealed instead? In property transactions, the concealment or encompassment of discrete social relations is a means of ‘cutting the network’ so that claims to property may be made—thereby creating both the form of a person as a bounded individual and the form of the object to be owned. In other circumstances, concealment is a means by which persons take the form of ‘bureaucrats’ and through which larger forms such as Society or the State emerge. Concealment might be conceived as a productive force, and a means of demarcation. It reconfigures perimeters allowing new social and political forms to emerge yet carries heavy implications as rights, obligations, and opportunities both appear and are obviated.
Concealment might be read in terms of sameness, suppression, encompassment, secrecy, or cancellation. What is of interest are the kinds of social forms, understandings, and relationships that it produces. In an era in which social forms travel around the globe and social relations connect disparate groups, sameness leads to concealment and places ‘context’ at risk, making the anthropological endeavour difficult to pursue or else shifting its focus. Rather than seeing sameness or concealment as removing the very forms that an anthropologist might seek to detect, this panel examines the creativity of concealment. In particular, it seeks to examine the way in which traceability and concealment work together, operate in different moments, and to different effects.
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