[Linganth] CfP AAA 2019 - Anthropologies of Ground

[Joshua Shapero]

Call for Papers
AAA 2019 Annual Meeting
Vancouver, BC, CAN
November 20-24

"Anthropologies of Ground"

Organizer
Joshua Shapero (College of William and Mary)
shaperoj at umich.edu

Abstract:

This panel gathers together the frayed ends of an old and familiar concept:
ground. It is now commonly recognized that the physical surface of the
earth is not an empty stage for human culture (nor space an
undifferentiated template for human geography). However, this consensus
certainly hasn’t entailed a growing enthusiasm to embrace environmental
determinism. The physical world in which we live and work, we have come to
believe, is neither an empty canvass nor a primary cause, but rather a
question that always needs asking. Ironically--and a bit fittingly--this
leaves us at a philosophical juncture in which the environment becomes
epistemologically unstable just as it becomes equally volatile in its
essential materiality and threatens to take on the worst kind of
determinism. There is no doubt that anthropology’s serpentine tradition of
research on human-environment interactions places the discipline in a
position to respond that can be ideal if carefully disentangled. In this
context, the panel proposes to explore the concept of “ground,” in the
hopes that its web of affordances can help suture our recently untethered
notion of “environment” to the fundamentally comparative and paradoxically
empirical study of human subjectivity--and intersubjectivity--that
ethnography yields.



One way of asking this question is to ponder what must be added to--or
subtracted from--the physical environment in order to arrive at an idea of
a *ground* against which human subjectivity is figured. Is it
phenomenology? Culture itself? Biology? Cognition? History? Language? Such
answers seem to go too far and not far enough at the same time. There is no
doubt that the embodied and shared knowledge engendered by cultural
patterns of habitual environmental practices--whether herding routes,
fishing streams, or riding metros--indelibly shapes our perceptions of
personhood, foregrounding individual subjects against the dark silence of
the naturalized like figures in chiaroscuro. However, this presents an
opportunity-- yet to be seized--to ask a number of important questions. How
uniform is this relationship? Are there any hard boundaries among the
myriad forms of environmental engagement that resonate as fundamentally
different kinds of subjectivities? Might New Yorkers and Appalachians
differ in ways that we have yet to perceive? Or perhaps might New Yorkers
themselves be differentiated at a surprisingly deep level by their habitual
mode of transportation? What are the actual mechanisms by which this takes
place? Do fluctuations in climate, political ideology, or economic flows
play causal roles here? Can we map variability in patterns of communicative
practice or abstract nonverbal concepts onto the terrain of environmental
subjectivity? By re-introducing--or re-entwining--the concept of “ground,”
this panel aims to provide a concrete approach for answering these
questions. To be precise, panelists will explore the grounds--in both its
physical and the logical senses--against which we can make sense of humans’
senses of themselves as agents, their sense of what it means to be related
with (or unrelated to) others, and their sense about what it means to be
human at all.
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