[Linganth] CFP for panel on Copies, Imitations and Replicas (AAA 2015 )

[William Feeney]

Call for Papers: American Anthropological Association, 2015

Discussant: Constantine Nakassis, University of Chicago
Panel Organizer: William Feeney, University of Chicago

Panel Title: Regimes of Iconicity: Semiotically Grounding Copies, Imitations and Replicas.

This panel examines copies, imitations and replicas with a critical eye towards the conventional understandings, practices and processes that enable their meaningful production and potentially diverse social entanglements (Nakassis 2013, Newell 2013, Lempert 2014). We depart from commonsense notions of imitation, copying and replication as straightforward reproductions of natural or essential characteristics. Instead, we turn attention to conventional frameworks, ideologies and habits that condition the grounds by which recognitions of similarity and resemblance come to be taken up. Such resources participate in determining the focal criteria and thresholds of variance that condition the possibilities for, and the quality of, a replica, imitation or copy. We ask questions about such iconic encounters in action. How are copies, imitations and replicas recognizably materialized? What schematizing knowledge is at work? What makes a social object into a copy, imitation or replica, and further still, what makes it a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ copy? How might this delimit what can be ‘copyable’ to begin with (eg. a commodity, an image, a voice, a style, etc…)?

In this way, we take the production of similarity and resemblance as a complex semiotic achievement and focus attention on the varied metapragmatics productive of the iconic grounds of resemblance, likeness and similarity. By attending to regimenting conditions and processes, we also hope to shed light on the particular semiotic practices and knowledge that render copies socially consequential in highly situated and specific ways. What kinds of social action do they fold into and with what kinds of ideological entailments? How do copies, replicas and imitations participate and perhaps mediate broader formations of social practice in regular ways? In addition to copies themselves, we further recognize that reflexive attention to ‘copying’ is itself often naturalized as a prerequisite enabling imitation and replication in the first instance. How might notions of copying, replication or imitation also become imbricated within particular ideological formulations, institutional formations and habits of interdiscursive practice?

Please send a 250 word abstract and a title for your proposed contribution to Bill Feeney (wfeeney at uchicago.edu) by Sunday April 5, 2015.





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