[Linganth] CfP for 2019 Annual Meeting of the AAA -- "De- and Re-Territorialization in Metropolitan France"

[Alexander Malcolm Thomson]

Dear Colleagues,

Ellen Badone and I are organizing a panel for the 2019 AAA/CASCA meetings
in Vancouver (Nov. 20-24, 2019) on De- and Re-Territorialization in
Metropolitan France. We are excited about the topic and would like to
invite you to participate. Please read our draft proposal for the panel
(below) and send us your paper abstracts by Sunday, March 24th. Also please
feel free to forward this CfP to other scholars working in the region.

Best wishes,

Alexander M. Thomson
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles

Ellen Badone
Professor, Anthropology and Religious Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton ON L8S 4K1
(905) 525-9140 ext. 23395



*De- and Re-Territorialization in Metropolitan France*


*Keywords*: Community, Communautarisme, De- and Reterritorialization,
France, Identity Politics, New and Classical Liberalism, Liquid Modernity,
Minorities, Regionalism


In keeping with the AAA-CASCA conference theme “Changing Climates:
Struggle, Collaboration and Justice,” this session brings together
anthropologists who work with diverse ethnic, linguistic, religious and
regional communities located in metropolitan France. We seek to foster an
exchange of ethnographic knowledge related to: the organizational
structures of these communities, their present and historical formations,
their tactical and strategic manœuvres vis-à-vis the state, their modes of
social relation (including the interrelation of communities), and their
modes of relating to the political economy. Through this exchange, we hope
to develop a richer understanding of how new and classical liberalism have
impacted France’s sub-national communities. Crucially, we treat the term
“community” – used in the conference theme – as part of our problematic. We
do this because we are aware of the controversies that this term has
sparked within the French context (e.g. the various accusations of
*communautarisme* that French parliamentarians have leveled against
cultural and religious organizations).


The French state has long refused to recognize sub-national communities as
legal entities lest they insinuate themselves between the state and the
citizen, arrogate rights that are (ideologically) ascribed to one of these
parties, or claim to derive specific rights from their entity-status (cf.
Colosimo 2016, Spinoza 1670[2007]). One notable example of this policy of
non-recognition is the government’s refusal to ratify the *European Charter
for Minority Languages* on the grounds that it contravenes the French
constitution and threatens the “unity and indivisibility of the Republic.”

Beyond policy decisions of this sort, which work against the recognition of
sub-national communities directly, the state apparatus (SA) also undermines
the cohesion of sub-national communities through a set of mundane
bureaucratic mechanisms (e.g. bank accounts, competitive exams,
identification cards). These mechanisms work to undermine community by
individuating, mobilizing and re-arranging elements of the population.


Nonetheless, it must be recognized that the French state has on other
occasions and in other ways reinforced sub-national communities. For
example, it tried to attenuate the phenomenon of urbanization during the 19
th century through the veneration of rural communities and corresponding
vilification of urban life in its scholastic manuals (Thiesse 1996, 2014).
Clearly, we are not dealing with an “absolute deterritorialization” here,
but rather one that is always partial and prone to relapse, one which
forever takes with one hand what it gives with the other (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980). In light of this recognition, we encourage our panelists to
reflect on the concrete ways that their research “communities” have been
made, unmade and re-made over time through their engagement with the state,
the global and national economies, and other segments of French society.


*Bibliography:*

Colosimo, Anastasia

2016 *Les bûchers de la liberté*. Paris, France: Stock.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari

1980 *Mille plateaux*. Paris, France: Éditions de minuit.

Spinoza, Benedictus de, Jonathan I Israel, and Michael Silverthorne

2007 *Theological-political treatise*. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press.

Thiesse, Anne-Marie

1996 *Les petites patries encloses dans la grande: les manuels scolaires
régionaux de la IIIe république*. Mission du patrimoine linguistique.
www.culture.gouv.fr/content/.../1/.../Ethno_Thiesse_1996_129.pdf.

2014 Ils apprenaient la France L’exaltation des régions dans le discours
patriotique. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.
http://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/2475, accessed February 25, 2019.
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