*AAA 2017 Call For Papers*

*The Anthropology of Anachronism: On Failures, Reversals and the Space-Time
of Political Possibility*



In many parts of the world we witness a disorienting sense of crisis and
emergency: political ideologies considered defeated (fascism, socialism) or
marginalized (nationalism, white supremacy) are gaining new prominence,
refusing to stay in the dustbin of history to which they were consigned.
Political, social, and economic rights once considered settled in law are
being disregarded, challenged, or overturned (reproductive rights, rights
to privacy, to work, to health, to vote, to equality). Institutionalized
commitments to environmental protection are being threatened, and
institutionalized processes like European unification have lost a sense of
inevitability and necessity.



Particularly striking is the way people characterize these developments: we
are “going backwards” rather than “moving forward,” political and social
forms widely represented as historical “failures” are finding success,
historic victories are being “reversed.”  All evince a sense of anachronism
– a feeling that something is not in its correct historical or
chronological time. This sense that time is “out of joint” is something we
have seen before – it has been articulated in and from diverse locations at
least since the end of the Cold War. This latest moment is continuing
evidence that how people feel about and make sense of political and social
transformation is largely organized by a modernist understanding of history
as the movement of progressive, linear, evolutionary time – leaving in its
wake non-repeating pasts.


This panel argues that this sense of anachronism provides an opening to
consider how the relationship between time and power is generated,
conceptualized, organized, reworked and resisted. It asks us to think more
specifically about the conditions (and authoritative frameworks) under
which something gets marked as a failure, or an era gets marked off as past
and the present gets defined as “post-” (socialist, colonial) – and how
those conditions and frameworks are changing today. The panel aims to look
at how various actors, including neo-fascist, socialist, or indigenous
ones, work at various scales to change what would be labelled as “progress”
and what as a “failure”. By complicating the notion of historical failure
this panel also suggests that we can fruitfully revisit what have been
marked as failures to find sites of an “otherwise,” rich with signs of
possible futures and potential politics.


We invite papers that look ethnographically at how politics becomes
inscribed into particular spatio-temporal configurations and how elements
of such failed or “obsolete” configurations get a new life, challenging and
reversing a modernist sense of historical direction (or, rather than
reversing modernist time, are seen to be corrective action, restoring
collective subjects like nations and races to their rightful place in
history). More specifically, we are interested in papers that explore how
the relationship between progress, time, and power is defined or challenged
in particular contexts. Activist struggles for gender, sexual, labour, or
ecological rights seem to be especially productive sites for thinking
through this relationship. More broadly, the papers could address how a
modernist understanding of historical progress is being reworked in the
fields of, for instance, development, electoral politics, policy, activism,
human rights, humanitarianism, ecology, work and labour, family and kin
networks, and so forth. We see this panel as contributing to anthropology’s
long-standing interest in understanding the historicity of the present.


*Please contact Carna Brkovic ([log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>)
or Andrew Gilbert ([log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>) with
inquiries or draft abstracts as soon as possible.*


*We will notify all of decision on the inclusion on the panel no later than
31 March.*

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