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*Circulation*
New Orleans, LA
November 17-21, 2010
Monica Heller
2010 Executive Program Chair
In 2010, the AAA will meet in New Orleans, where the river meets the sea.
New Orleans channels flows into the heart of a continent, and out across
oceans, around the globe. The boundary between river and sea, between water
and earth, is shifting and unclear. The circulation of people and other
living organisms, of material things, and of ideas in such zones of passage
constitutes some of the central social and physical processes of concern to
all kinds of anthropologists, historically and in the present.
New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting:
"Circulation." This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what
happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions,
methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation
across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and
in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers, facilitates,
constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes,
and for whom; and what their consequences might be for humans and for the
environment. It opens up questions about what exactly circulates: signs,
objects or bodies. Do different things circulate in different ways? Do they
change or remain constant? What new phenomena, arrangements and inequalities
does circulation produce? How are resources and ways of understanding them
identified, made sense of, produced and distributed in the process? How and
why do rates and types of circulation vary across time and space? What
crystallizes and what continues to flow and reshape?
"Circulation" also invites us to think across boundaries, whether those are
boundaries organizing phenomena we seek to describe and explain, boundaries
within and across disciplines, or boundaries among anthropologists or other
social groups. It asks us to turn our attention to zones of encounter,
conjunctions and liminal passages. It also requires us to ask whether
"circulation" is a helpful trope for the production of anthropological
knowledge. What light does it shed on the (increasingly widely circulating)
concept of "culture"--arguably the central organizing construct of
anthropology--and on anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers reflecting the perspectives of
all subfields and forms of anthropological practice, or across them,
investigating this theme with data, method and theory oriented to all
temporal and spatial horizons. Come and participate in the circulation of
ideas.
For details, please visit the AAA
website<http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm>
