[Linganth] CfP AAAs 2016 panel: Value(s) and Replication

[Haleema Welji]

CfP AAAs 2016: Value(s) and Replication

Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (November 16-20,
2016), Minneapolis, MN

Organizers

Haleema Welji, UC San Diego

Sowparnika Balaswaminathan, UC San Diego

Discussant

Professor David Pedersen, UC San Diego

The category of value has taken various meanings in its historical
engagement with anthropology from the economic rationalist models of
yesteryears to today’s shades of plurality. We look at “value” both
quantitatively through the socio-economic valuation placed upon labor,
speech, and objects, and also value qualitatively in the way language,
interaction, and everyday behaviors reflect cultural values (Lambek 2010,
2013). One can similarly interrogate the occurrence and idea of
replication, which could be experienced as a singular event or a habitus in
progress. Examples of such scholarship include re-enactments of religious
and cultural events (Fernea 1995; Mines 2005), reproductions of objects and
relations (Hull 2012; Lambek 2013), retellings of “histories” (Deeb 2009),
and recreations of meaning (Mendoza-Denton 2008). Our respondents are in
dialogic relationships (Bakhtin 1986) with their social contexts through
large and small scale replications, selecting and choosing what gets
replicated, how to produce, perform and talk about it, and why. Their roles
can vary from active agent or creator to subject of institutional processes
of creating replications: from the quotidian to the extraordinary, the
secular to the religious, the public to the private, and the singular to
the periodic.

This panel will approach the intersections that could occur between these
two topics, Value(s) and Replication. An illustration of such a paper could
be on how Jordanian schools utilize reenactments of the Hajj rituals to
prioritize and perform particular social and moral values in its students.
Another could be an analysis of the process through which governmental
cultural organizations promote hegemonic narratives through engendering
reproductions of historically valuable art. Thus, spanning a diverse range
of interest areas, from religious studies to linguistic analysis to visual
art, replication can be a strategic tools to think about the various forms
value can take including authority, authenticity, performativity, ethics,
and so on.

Focusing on these themes of replication and value, this panel invites
papers on the following topics and questions:

•       What makes something a replication and how do you discover it? Is
replication an event, or a process?

•       Do replications reach towards values, or are they instances of
performing values?

•       How are replications in dialogue: with the “original”, amongst
participants, by leaders and subjects, etc.?

•       How do replications of events or objects reinforce or challenge
hegemonic narrative structures?

•       What role does authenticity play in replications?

•       How are replications differentially experienced across social
groups?

•       How do notions of marginality map on to notions of the authentic
and the reproduction?

Professor David Pedersen (UC San Diego) will be a discussant for this
panel. Interested panelist please send a 250 word abstract and title to
Sowparnika Balaswaminathan (sbalaswa at ucsd.edu) and Haleema Welji (
hwelji at ucsd.edu) by April 9th. Accepted papers will be notified by April
11th. You can also contact us with questions.
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