(Philadelphia, 2-6 December 2009)
Call for Papers: THE RETURN OF THE VILLAGE: TROPE, SITE, AND PLACE
Convenor: Antonio Sorge, University of Prince Edward Island (asorge@upei.ca)
Discussant: Matei Candea, University of Cambridge (mc288@cam.ac.uk)
The village field-site as a key unit of analysis within ethnographic
research has been held by critics to be an example of a disciplinary
tendency to unduly privilege the study of face-to-face communities,
inevitably construed as 'parochial' or 'traditional,' over the realities of
political economy in a globalized world. Recently, however, the 'bounded'
ethnographic field site has been returning to the forefront of
anthropological inquiry in new, reconfigured forms: as experiential matrices
of personal and collective identity, sites of cultural contestation, hubs of
emergent social forms variously integrated within national and transnational
networks, or as arbitrary locations in a reconfigured anthropological
methodology.
This session inquires into the village as lived-in place and sacred
topology, as aesthetic experience and moral idiom of belonging. It tracks
the actual and often unexpected spatial configurations upon which villages
are mapped, and examines possible reinventions of the old anthropological
standard of village-based ethnography.
. We invite papers that examine ethnographic research methodologies
and modes of representation considered within a wider reappraisal of the
value of the 'bounded' village community as an analytical category.
. Papers that problematize the assumptions underlying classical
ethnographic fieldwork, consider its relative merits and demerits, and weigh
these against available alternatives, are especially welcome, as are all
papers that engage the broader issue of the end(s) of ethnography.
Please send abstracts by e-mail to asorge@upei.ca by Wednesday, March 25,
2009. Session participants will be confirmed shortly thereafter.
