call for papers

[Jim Wilce]

Dear Colleagues:

This is a call to anthropologists on the list for expressions of
interest in a panel I would like to put together at the AAA on
"Interpretive Practice"

What I have in mind is papers on the ways interpretation happens, that
is, the everyday practice of interpretation by situated social actors.
Given that conceptual categories never completely "fit" real-life
situations, I am interested in the ways that routine procedures,
cultural categories and social positions come together in particular
"instances" of interpretation. Such practices, it seems to me, can only
be discovered through ethnography.

My immediate focus is on my work with journalists, both in the US and in
India. The majority of sociological and linguistic
approaches to journalism tend to erase their agency as interpreters of
the world, dwelling on the overdetermination of their
texts. For myriad disciples of Gramsci, they are simply "organic
intellectuals," for Schudson they are but channels that provide official
voices a forum, for others they are "relatively unconscious agents of
the everyday practices of domination." These theses run counter to the
life experiences of journalists, who see themselves as   trying to
figure out "what's the story, here?" and whose practices for discovering
stories are habitual but indeterminate, strategic and situational, and
which rely on official voices yet are keenly aware of and resistant to
being "handled." The nature of interpretive practice among journalists
differs dramatically from the US to India, yet both are alike in that
every new situation must be interpreted afresh and turned somehow into
some kind of event.

Obviously, this applies to all manner of producers of expressive culture
-- and to their audiences. Yet I am thinking not only
about text-producers but also other kinds of interpreters. One of my new
interests is administrative law, in which bureaucrats
must engage in the interpretive practice of turning messy strips of real
life into sharply delineated categories that will determine
whether or not people get the assistance they need. Likewise, my wife's
field of psychotherapy is a deeply divided on issues of
interpretive practice, many believing that a flexible approach to
interpretation is both more realistic and more conducive to
helping the patients reinterpret their own lives in ways that allow them
to deal with their defined problems. Yet diagnosis
according to the psychological bible, the DSM-III, is often a
prerequisite for patients getting their therapy funded.

If I can get enough expressions of interest I'll put out an official
call for papers and try to put a session together.

Anybody interested?

Mark Allen Peterson
American University in Cairo
peterson at aucegypt.edu


Jim Wilce
      Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Asian Studies
        Northern Arizona University
        Box 15200
        Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200

fax 520/523-9135
office ph. 520/523-2729
email jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/ (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh)
http://www.nau.edu/asian