[Linganth] AAA Panel CFP, "The Presentation of Self in Workaday Life"

[Elizabeth Brummel]

*CALL FOR PAPERS:*

*The Presentation of Self In Workaday Life*

Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association

November 18-22, 2015



Co-Organizers:

Elizabeth Brummel (University of Chicago)

Adam Sargent (University of Chicago)



While economic anthropology has demonstrated the ways in which notions of
selves as economically valuable have become increasingly important around
the globe (Anagnost 2004, Gershon 2011, Salzinger 2003), linguistic
anthropology has developed a robust set of analytical tools for
understanding the emergence of selves in everyday interactions. This panel
seeks to draw these approaches to work and the self into productive
dialogue.

Contemporary workaday life often requires individuals to perform themselves
as ideally suited to or expert in even the most mundane roles. Specialized
registers and regulations to role inhabitance serve as gatekeeping and
knowledge-bounding technologies that cordon off fields of expertise,
produce their experts, and transform their participants (Mertz 2007,
Wortham 2009). In his classic dramaturgical analysis of interpersonal
interaction, Erving Goffman referred to these registers and models for
comportment as "rhetorics of training" capable of producing professions as
much as their practitioners (1959:46). We aim to push the analyses further
by looking at the ways in which infrastructures of interpersonal
interaction not only inform but also constitute work itself. Drawing
inspiration from scholarship on the linkages between language and political
economy (Irvine 1989, Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012), this panel seeks to
explore the linguistic and interactional work of presenting selves as a key
element in economic practice including the generation of new economic
possibilities.

In neoliberal markets this happens quite explicitly as potential workers
are increasingly encouraged to market themselves to companies as bundles of
skills (Urciuoli 2008). With the overwhelming influence of international
development in Uganda, for example, the performance of particular personae
have become important modes of attracting NGO resources, a new form of
productive labor. In places like Kenya where unemployment is rife, youth
perform the persona of their chosen professions such as counselors or
motivational speakers in everyday interactions, activity that is
simultaneously work in itself and a claim to economic inclusion. Even
"traditional" work situations such as construction sites in India are
mediated through the production and negotiation of particular personae, the
"angry boss," the "skilled carpenter." All of these personae not only do
interactional work, but also, so this panel argues, make work itself work.

We welcome paper abstracts that explore the ways in which registers and
infrastructures of interaction produce, and make economically effective,
various social personae around the globe.





*Please respond to this call by March 23, 2015 by emailing an abstract of
no more than 250 words to:*

*Elizabeth Brummel (ebrummel at uchicago.edu <ebrummel at uchicago.edu>**) and
Adam Sargent (sargenta at uchicago.edu <sargenta at uchicago.edu>**) *

-- 
Elizabeth Brummel
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
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