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 'materialist–symbolic' debate in the
discipline. However, too little attention has been paid to the ways
that 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, 5th
April 2011. Session participants will be confirmed shortly thereafter.
