Panel Proposal for CASCA Annual Meetings, 8-10 May 2008, Carleton
University
Organizers: Kendra Coulter (University of Windsor) and Thomas M. Wilson
(SUNY-Binghamton)
Governments are sites of cultural production, constraint, and contestation,
and are often central catalysts for fundamental political and economic
change in local, regional, national and international domains. In and
across
these levels, anthropologists are well-positioned to analyse government
institutions, their various social actors, and their ideas, practices,
policies and agendas, while welding government activity to broader
political, economic and historical contexts. In the contemporary global
political terrain, governments are inextricable from the policies,
institutions and actions that are at the heart of neoliberalism,
imperialism, war, and inequality. Thus government projects
are worthy of continued if not increased anthropological analysis. The
proposed panel seeks to contribute to a politically-engaged anthropology of
government which sees governments as conjunctures of state power,
neoliberal
facilitation and justification, and hegemonic reproduction and production,
yet sometimes also as sites of progressive transformative possibility.
Please send questions and/or abstracts of 100 words to Kendra Coulter -
kcoulter@uwindsor.ca
by February 9th.
