of Belonging.
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association
(110th Annual Meeting
, November 16-20, 2011
, Montreal, QC,
Canada)
Over the past twenty years, anthropology has come to accept that much
of what we understand as environment, nature and landscape has
been—and continues to be—constructed by the communities that use,
perceive and dwell in these spaces. Much of this work has been
oriented towards the symbolic process of placemaking, forging identity
out of sacred locales, reconsidering the uses of animism in religious
praxis and addressing the broader theoretical materialist–symbolic
debate in the discipline. However, there is an important dearth of
attention—outside the domain of Native American ethnography—on the
extent to which these processes intersect with ethnicity, 'race' and
forms of contestation over land and belonging. From maroon perceptions
of remote wilderness as a place of refuge and safety from the
brutality and foreignness of the plantation to the construction of
rural America as a pure, white homeland for Euro-American settlers to
the imagining of tropical foragers as resources of the forest divested
of any claim to land or citizenship, ethnicity and 'race' is
frequently implicated in conflicts and debates about how different
communities perceive and 'belong to' the land they occupy. This panel
seeks contributions from scholars interrogating the ways in which
notions of 'race' and ethnicity articulate within conceptualizations
of human-nature relatedness, ecological praxis, and cleavages that
emerge between different communities and identities.
Please send abstracts by e-mail to Marc Boglioli (mbogliol@drew.edu)
or Allan Dawson (adawson@drew.edu) at Drew University by Monday, 4th
April 2011. Session participants will be confirmed shortly thereafter.
