[Linganth] Fwd: AAA Panel on Mesoamerica - participants sought (fwd)

[Kathryn Woolard]

>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 15:19:30 -0600
>From: Robey Callahan <robey.callahan at spinbox.org.uk>
>Subject: AAA Panel on Mesoamerica - participants sought
>
>
>An invitation to a panel for AAA 2005 of possible interest to
>Anthropologists and Folklorists focusing on Mesoamerica:
>
>Rabelaisian Cultural Practices: Bakhtin in Mesoamerica
>
>While studies of Mesoamerican culture have presented many varied images of
>their subjects over the years, the more enduring perceptions center on the
>region's peoples as ritual healers, canny agriculturalists, talented
>artisans, passive bearers of unique folk traditions, and, more recently,
>victims of colonial and post-colonial domination.  What these perceptions
>often share is the idea of clean and, in some cases, heroic actors.
>Considerably less attention has been paid to the more irreverent, satirical,
>or overtly sexual aspects of ritual, drama, festival, storytelling, joking,
>gossip, and other cultural practices throughout the region.  Embedded within
>the dailogism of these and allied aestheticized productions, we find time
>and again commentary--often of a rather pointed nature--on issues of
>identity and power.  Sometimes this commentary is rather local in outlook;
>sometimes (e.g., within transnational folk and touristic performances) it is
>potentially global in reach.
>
>The application of Bakhtin's work to idealized perceptions of "low" cultural
>display genres is particularly useful in Latin American societies where the
>symbolic space is one of the more heterogeneous, due to the extant
>differences among indigenous, mestizo, and non-mestizo groups.  In addition
>to drawing upon new field research, papers in this session uncover or
>re-contextualize elements of the grotesque and "lower bodily functions"
>buried in footnotes and appendices of classical ethnographies or in more
>obscure documents--all with the aim of exploring how this Bakhtinian
>perspective contributes specifically to regional ethnography and more
>generally to anthropology and folklore.
>
>If you are interested, please email an abstract by 20 March to
>robey.callahan at spinbox.org.uk and loewe at soc.msstate.edu
>
>Or, please send us any questions you may have to
>robey.callahan at spinbox.org.uk
>
>Thanks!
>
>Best,
>Robey Callahan (University of Pennsylvania)
>Ron Loewe (Mississippi State University)


--
Kathryn A. Woolard			kwoolard at ucsd.edu
Professor				Phone: (858) 534-4639
Department of Anthropology, 0532		Fax :     (858) 534-5946
UCSD
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0532