[Linganth] CFP AAA/CASCA 2019: Routes and Checkpoints - Ethnographic practice

[Hannah McElgunn]

Call for Abstracts

American Anthropological Association / Canadian Anthropology Society joint
conference

Vancouver, Canada

November 20-24, 2019



*Routes and Checkpoints: Practically Realizing Ethnography’s Theoretical
Promises*

Organizers: Perry Wong and Hannah McElgunn, PhD Candidates, Anthropology,
University of Chicago


Discussant: Trevor Reed (Arizona State University)



Ethnography as a practice and the fraught histories of anthropology’s
disciplinary formation have both emerged as increasingly significant means
and domains for explicitly re-negotiating contemporary political horizons.
Insights from STS and allied ethnographic approaches that have sought to
realistically portray Earth and Biophysical Sciences as situated social
practice, decolonizing critiques of anthropological knowledge, and
Bakhtinian insights about voicing and genre, among others, have contributed
to current Anthropological Theory, but what have these ideas contributed to
the development of current anthropological research practices, particularly
ethnography, and how, exactly?

We are interested in opening the door to more pragmatically-theorized and
realized Anthropology in terms of the roles and rituals that academic
anthropologists perform “in the field,” in writing, and in the classroom. But
rather than prompt re-evaluation of *other *anthropologists, we ask how
accumulated bodies of anthropological expertise inform *your* work,
contemporarily, concretely and operationally. The current era of
ethnographic experimentation was brought about in part through
retrospective consideration of how Ethnography was differentially
constructed as one of professional Anthropology’s keystone genres against
other “anti-genres” like the missionary travelogue, the literary novel, the
personal diary, and then later conventionalized and purified to fill a slot
in an ever more disciplined bibliographic edifice, in the process
foreclosing other kinds of intertextual chains and citational practices.
Taking these critical conversations to their practical conclusions, we ask
not how these occlusions came to be, or how they continue, but rather: *What
modes of intertextuality and citation might open up these borders,
re-opening long closed routes of communication and brokering the
establishment of new kinds of checkpoints? *Following ongoing discussions
about how historical modes of anthropological field research and writing
seem to silence or misrecognize or reduce the subjects of Anthropological
knowledge as mere objects of Science, we ask: *How do you yourself
collaboratively elicit, record, curate, and share new information, or
re-new archival materials to constructively address old occlusions? *

We approach these issues as anthropologists who have found themselves
following in the footsteps of multiple generations of previous
fieldworkers, and more particularly, as inheritors of legacy materials and
institutional arrangements that we ourselves would not seek to produce.
While our own projects deal with the Native American languages, we are
interested in fostering collegial dialogue across other subdisciplinary and
regional foci, because we believe these questions are of a fundamental
sociocultural nature and do not belong only to experts and specialties. Our
interest is rather to chart how anthropological knowledge informs the
actual practices, products, and institutional arrangements of contemporary
anthropological research projects as a way to conceive a more contemporary
anthropological ethics.


We welcome proposals for papers that are actively theorizing and
implementing revised versions of old techniques of anthropological field
research, knowledge production and distribution, and institutional
arrangements. Please send a proposed abstract of 250 words to Perry Wong (
perrywong at uchicago.edu) and Hannah McElgunn (mcelgunn at uchicago.edu) by
March 28th. Accepted papers will be notified by April 1st in advance of the
AAA/CASCA deadline for beginning submissions through the online portal by
April 5.
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