[Linganth] AAA 2018 Session CFP: Dignity in Conviviality

[Maisa Taha]

Hi all,

I am looking for additional panelists for the 2018 AAA Meetings in San
Jose. Please share as you see fit, and let me know if you are interested!

AAA 2018 CFP

Session Title:* Dignity and Conviviality*

Organizer: Maisa Taha (Montclair State University)

     This session focuses on popular and anthropological imaginings of
conviviality to address dignity and dignity-claiming as central to the
fraught art of “getting along” across lines of difference. In philosophy,
dignity exists as a categorical imperative (Kant 1996) or emerges
implicitly in utopically reformed socioeconomic relations (Illich 2009).
Meanwhile, anthropological treatments of conviviality have emphasized
aesthetic practices as symbolic of willing cultural intimacy, melding
differences into shared repertoires of expression and creating
counterweights to social fracturing or inequality (Erickson 2011; Overing
and Passes 2000). In the midst of the largest global displacement of people
since World War II, burgeoning grassroots political movements (in the U.S.
alone: BLM, #metoo, #NeverAgain), and myriad efforts by state and non-state
actors to manage demographic and political changes, what can we learn about
contemporary personhood by attending to dignity claims and threats (Hicks
2013)?

   My objective is to bring interdisciplinary and geographic breadth to
bear on dignity as an under-examined, but ideologically and experientially
rich, feature of convivial debates. I hope to illuminate how
dignity-claiming tactics among disadvantaged—as well as privileged—actors
resist or reframe contextually hegemonic notions of conviviality. To these
ends, ethnographic case studies relevant to the following questions are
most welcome: What does dignity look and sound like, empirically? How do
dignity-claiming repertoires intersect with performances of identity,
subjectivity, or citizenship? How do aesthetic practices related to
conviviality subsume or elevate dignity threats and claims? And how might
dignity claims signal morally adaptive strategies when rights and
recognitions are foreclosed? In building toward an anthropological theory
of dignity, we will interrogate common usages and scholarly assumptions
around this idea, using convivial practices and projects as generative
frameworks for understanding the structural, phenomenological, and
discursive dimensions of human resilience in the face of competition over
space, status, and resources.

I'm especially interested in having this panel bridge linguistic and
sociocultural anthropology and would be eager to include work that
addresses any of the following:
- formal and informal efforts to "get along" across recognized lines of
difference and establish criteria for involvement (e.g., political
movements, artistic interventions)
- historic and contemporary anthropological approaches to human equality
and difference
- popular and/or authoritative discourses that appropriate/echo
dignity-claiming strategies of nondominant actors
- dislocating or disorienting situations that juxtapose the ideal of
"getting along" with the imperative of "getting by" (e.g., transnational
migrant/refugee experiences, aging/chronic disease)

Please indicate interest and topic immediately to taham at montclair.edu. Full
(250-word) abstracts will be due by *Friday, **March 30*.

Erickson, B. (2011). Utopian virtues: Muslim neighbors, ritual sociality,
and the politics of convivència. *American Ethnologist,38*(1), 114-131.
doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01296.x
Hicks, D. (2013). *Dignity: Its essential role in resolving conflict*. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Illich, I. (2009). *Tools for conviviality*. London: Marion Boyars.
Kant, I. (1996). *The metaphysics of morals *(M. J. Gregor, Trans.).
Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Overing, J., & Passes, A. (Eds.). (2000). *The anthropology of love and
anger: The aesthetics of conviviality in Native Amazonia*. New York:
Routledge.

Maisa C. Taha, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Montclair State University
Dickson Hall 128
(973) 655-7933
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8617-2764
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