[Linganth] AAA 2018 CFP: Curating Value

[Kristin Hickman]

AAA Annual Meeting 2018


Panel Title: Curating Value


Co-organizers: Britta Ingebretson (University of Chicago,
ingebretson at uchicago.edu) and Kristin Gee Hickman (University of Chicago,
hickman at uchicago.edu)

Discussant: Jillian Cavanaugh (CUNY)


Value has been of central concern to anthropology since the discipline’s
origin. While much of the early work was in the province of economic
anthropology (Bohannan 1959; Munn 1976; Weiner 1976), a recent resurgence
of interest in value has led a wide range of anthropologists to rethink and
retheorize these foundational works in light of new economic and social
systems, technologies, and increasing globalization (cf. Hau 2013). Yet
these emerging conversations have largely overlooked the extent to which
value, as a concept of relational difference (cf. Saussure 1959), has also
been foundational to the subfield of linguistic anthropology. While not
always speaking in the language of “value” per se, linguistic
anthropologists have long been interested in examining questions such as
how particular ways of speaking become valued or devalued (Hill 1993; Rosa
2016) and the intersection of language and linguistic ideologies with other
regimes of economic and moral value (Gal and Woolard 2001; Duchêne and
Heller 2012; Woolard 2016). Most recently, a new generation of
semiotically-inclined anthropologists have opened up these questions in new
ways by bringing them into conversation with broader discussions of
capitalism, aesthetics, materiality, and authenticity (Paxon 2010; Shankar
and Cavanaugh 2012; Graan 2016; Nakassis 2016).


In this panel, we hope to build on these semiotic approaches to value and
value-making through a focus on the idea of curation. By curation, we are
referring to multimodal processes of assemblage and display of “things,”
such as activities, demeanors, discourses, or material objects, such that
their value becomes legible to others. This process of “curating value”
requires, therefore, both the curator and their object of address to share
a common ground of interpretation such that value becomes legible in the
“right” way. Curation, in this sense, thus opens up the study of value to
questions of legibility, modality, commensuration, translation, and
transduction. Although curation is often imagined to take place at a
particular scale, as in the curation of objects in a museum, we are also
interested in how acts of curation-as-value-making can be scaled both up
and down, from individual projects of self-fashioning and self-cultivation
to larger projects of curation that take place at the level of city,
region, or nation.


We welcome papers with diverse regional and topical foci that speak broadly
to the theme of curating value. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250
words, together with your name, title, institutional affiliation, and email
address to Britta Ingebretson (ingebretson at uchicago.edu) and Kristin
Hickman (hickman at uchicago.edu) by March 28th.
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