[Linganth] CfP AAA — Utopia and Changing the Future: Anthropology’s Role in Imagining Alternatives

[Teruko Vida Mitsuhara]

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


*Utopia and Changing the Future: Anthropology’s Role in Imagining
Alternatives*

*Organizer: Teruko Mitsuhara, Anthropology PhD Candidate
(UCLA)tmitsuhara at ucla.edu <tmitsuhara at ucla.edu>*

In the current era where nation-state primacy dwindles as corporations and
borderless economies take its place (Brown 2010), it would seem that utopia has
no place beyond science fiction, and certainly not to be taken seriously in
any practice.  The utopia (lit. “non-place” as well as “place of
happiness”) of Thomas More’s time, where an island far away holds the
secrets to an ideal society, seems impossible to imagine or actually
create. The web of globalization appears to have no limit, certainly no
physical escape is possible, yet fiction and governments still look to
outer space for imagined refuge from our world. Preeminent scholar of utopia,
Frederic Jameson (1996, xii) famously pointed out that “[i]t seems to be
easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth
and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” So what do we do with
the people who try anyway? What to do with the ones who dare to fight
against or disengage from the current world order? Ruth Levitas (2017,
3-4), writes that “the Utopian approach allows us not only to imagine what
an alternative society could look like, but enables us to imagine what it
might feel like to inhabit it, thus giving a greater potential depth to our
judgements about the good.” This panel thus explores two questions about
utopian thought’s applicability in anthropology: How do communities
intentionally design and mobilize alternative futures? And, what is the
role of anthropology as a discipline in imagining alternative futures for
our world?

Samuel Gerald Collins (2008, 11) creates a useful term for anthropology’s
approach to time, “tempocentrism,” which “suggests that in overarching
categories of modernity and globalization, cultures are often placed on
different temporal paths, inevitably heading toward designated futures of
repetition disguised as perpetual change” (Bryant 2019, 13). In concert
with theorists who attempt to “break away from the future of culture as
being a return to the past” (Bryant 2019, 13), this panel aims to not
reduce our field participants’ look to the future as a legitimation of the
how they live now, but “rather look to the future to radically shake our
understandings of the past and to remake identity in the present” (Collins
2008, 125; Bryant 2019, 13). Building from Hardt and Negri’s (2009) concept
of “alter-modernity” and radical politics, Ghassan Hage (2012, 286)
proposes “alter-anthropology,” where “critical anthropological thought can
generate new problematics that are of pertinence to radical politics.”
Here, Hage draws on the works of Viveiros de Castro and others who advocate
for the potential of taking radical alterity seriously not as an
alternative world lying outside, elsewhere, but as a transformative force
that can be operative anywhere. Alterity here does not mean that
alternative futures can come only in trying to locate a “primitive” other
far away and hidden to enrich the anthropological imagination. Instead, as
Hage (2015, 74) discusses, everyday alterity exists for us all in the form
of “minor realities,” which emerge in the enmeshment in the Real. Taking
this one step further, this panel seeks contributions from scholars whose
research participants consciously fashion themselves as “others” or
position their missions/goals as alternatives to the climate (economic,
political, financial, or religious) of their hegemonic realities. This
panel welcomes contributions about contemporary movements that explicitly
and reflexively try to make “alternative worlds possible ”through “new”
intentional community projects, conversion to fundamentalist or New Age
religion, or political activism.



<*Pending modifications and additions depending on the papers recruited for
this panel.*>



*If interested, please email your abstract along with a title and your
professional affiliation to Teruko Mitsuhara (tmitsuhara at ucla.edu
<tmitsuhara at ucla.edu>) by March 30th. Thank you.*
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