2-6 December 2009)
Call for Papers: THE RETURN OF THE VILLAGE: TROPE, SITE, AND PLACE
Session chair: 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.
We need a couple of more presenters to round out this proposed session. We
ask any who are interested to kindly contact us as soon as possible.
Abstracts will be accepted no later than Monday, March 30, 2009 (AAA
registration deadline is Wednesday, April 1). Please send abstracts by
e-mail to asorge@upei.ca. Session participants will be confirmed shortly
thereafter.
