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Proposed panel ‘Researching casualties’ 111th AAA Annual Meeting (Borders and Crossings), 14-18th November 2012, San Francisco, United States

According to Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 2011) the production of ‘human waste’ is an inevitable side-effect of modernization, even the consequence of modernity’s global triumph. ‘Human waste’ frankly refers to the ‘wasted lives’, i.e. the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees, and other outcasts who are deprived of adequate means of survival and the rights enjoyed by others of the social order. In the ongoing quest for economic progress, order and security, they fall outside the law, are treated as a criminal problem or threat, and are ultimately considered as the casualties or ‘collateral damage’ of our contemporary liquid-global age.

This panel seeks to explore the rising volume of (social) suffering relegated to this status of  ‘collaterallity’, and aims at getting insight into the lived experience of those ‘wasted lives’ as present day homines sacri. In so doing, we seek to examine the underlying mechanisms of distinctions that are made between those lives that are recognized as grievable and disposable, and those lives that are not, as respectively Judith Butler (2004, 2009) and Achille Mbembe (2003) put it. Although these complex issues are usually associated with burning matters as state violence, war, conflict, coercion and racism, this panel also seeks for a greater sensitivity to practices of every day violence, chronic social suffering and interrelated feelings of righteous indifference, neglect, insecurity and loss (cf. Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2004; Kleinman et al. 1997; Klinenberg 1999).

The objective is to bring together contributions from different fields of research containing various theoretical perspectives and illustrative ethnographic analyses from across the globe. Some papers will address issues of being outcasted and suffering as features of cultural representation. Others will examine what economic, political and institutional power does (or does not) to people, and how and why certain experiences of suffering, neglect and expulsion are expressed and heard, while others are shrouded in silence.

Clearly, neither suffering nor collaterallity can be examined as a single theme or a uniform experience. Consequently we do not only have to traverse our discipline in order to ‘revamp our anthropological toolkit’ (Ho 2007), but we have to find methodologies that help to represent the diversity of experiences, and the lives that are considered as ‘waste’. This panel aspires therefore to discuss what W. J. T. Mitchell (in Kleinman et al. 1997: xii) called ‘a master moral dilemma’, namely the gap between representation and responsibility. What do we represent and how do we picture the issues mentioned above? How does this subsequently prefigure possible intervention and how does it relate to our responsibilities as anthropologists and human beings? 

The most significant questions (for theory and practice) to be raised in this panel might therefore be those questions that cross the borders of our way of doing fieldwork and our interpretative method of knowledge production. By discussing alternative ways of understanding and representing, we aim to explore possibilities that reduce ethnographic distances and, possibly, replace academic relativism for an engaged or militant anthropology, for which Nancy Scheper-Hughes once made a passionate plea.

Please submit a 250 word abstract to [log in to unmask] at the latest 7 April 2012.  Accepted papers will be notified by 10 April and MUST have current membership in the AAA and have registered and paid for the 2012 meetings BEFORE April 15, 2012.

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