[Linganth] available slots on AAA panel

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
I am putting together an AAA panel at the last minute -- tentatively 
in-person but of course you can
appear virtually if you prefer.   There are still some slots (2-3) 
available if you would like to participate, but
haven't yet found a flexible enough panel.   Please let me know if you 
are interested at igershon at indiana.edu:

The panel abstract:

How Folklore Persuades in its Travels

This panel addresses so-called “folkloric” forms of evidence and 
authority in contemporary political and legal contexts.Scholars have 
historically seen such authority in supposedly modern contexts as acts 
of transplantation—character toys of Taiwanese gods are transplanted 
gods, Berkeley-based shamans are New Age re-creations of older 
roles.However, this overlooks the intricate ways in which political 
relations and folkloric notions of authority and evidence are 
co-constitutive.The speakers are exploring two intertwined questions 
about the mutually constitutive links between social relations and 
contexts, namely: How, and with what baggage, do folkloric indexes 
travel from context to context? And, to what extent do particular social 
relations and folkloric indexes recursively constitute their contexts?To 
address this question ethnographically, the authors explore how 
folkloric authority—when framed as traditional and locatable--is 
promised and performed in contexts constructed as modern and displaceable.

People engaged in establishing persuasive political frameworks 
increasingly find the dichotomy between the traditional and the modern 
good to think with, often implicitly invoking the dialectic processes 
inherent to this dichotomy in efforts to understand widespread economic, 
legal, and social transformations, and propose alternatives.While the 
comparison between tradition and modern seems endemic to the political 
moment, the techniques with which people create this dichotomy are quite 
divergent, techniques which produce different forms of authority, 
different gendered relations, as well as different sorts of hybrid 
contexts.Not all techniques for producing such dichotomies are equally 
effective, or mutually compatible.Sometimes these diverse political 
projects resonate with each other for a time, creating productive yet 
finite collaborations.The connections between authority and folklore are 
culturally specific, and it is this specificity that structures both how 
well forms of authority travel, and how well they articulate with 
putatively modern contexts.


Best,

Ilana

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