In Search of Panelists for AAA Conference Panel: Development in the �Developed� Second World

[Emily Van Buskirk]

I am posting this message on behalf of Tomas Matza.

CALL FOR PAPERS
 
106th Annual Meeting
American Anthropological Association
Washington, DC
November 28 - December 2, 2007

 
Abstracts due Monday, March 26

 
Panel: Development in the “Developed” Second World

 
How do we talk about modernization and development in places with a history 
of a state-socialist commitment to those projects?  What analytical purchase 
can the former Second World offer to the anthropology of development? This 
panel proposes to approach these questions by interrogating what is 
happening to the very fundament of development discourse’s target—the 
human subject—in post-socialism.

    

In a striking parallel with liberal and neoliberal developmentalism, one of state 
socialism’s central concerns, too, was the production of rational, 
responsibilized, and prudent subjects. Much ink was spilled, in a wide range of 
disciplines, about building a “new Soviet man” who would also be self-
motivated, enterprising, efficient. The famed mine-worker Stakhanov, tripling 
his output by his own ingenuity, here appears as a peculiar precursor to the 
subject of neoliberal development discourse. When looking closely, we can find 
socialist counterparts for many of the privileged terms of neoliberal 
development discourse: even rational choice theory has a Communist cousin in 
Leontiev’s theory of activity.

 

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s postsocialist societies were recast 
as “misdeveloped” and in need of re-development, hence encountering 
another developmentalist paradigm, this time of the neoliberal variety. These 
are histories that commenced with the economic “shock therapy” and mass 
privatization of the 1990s, and continue today in more dispersed forms 
through public health programs, the sharing of expertise, efforts to foster civil 
society, and the spread of NGOs. How have these complex histories of multiple 
encounters with development and modernization rhetoric translated into 
projects and experiences of subject-formation in post-socialism? How have 
the old concepts like responsibility, reason, ethics, and freedom been recast 
for, and experienced by, post-socialist subjects?

 

What forms of enterprise have unfolded today in the context of neoliberal 
reforms enacted by postsocialist strong (and not so strong) states? What is 
the role of expertise and professionalism in postsocialist subject-formation, 
given that we may be witnessing a process of deprofessionalization in many 
spheres? How do the histories of postsocialist expertise complicate the central 
position experts occupy in accounts of neoliberal subject-formation?

 

We invite papers that address these and other related issues, and which are 
focused on postsocialist countries. Possible topics may include, but are not 
limited to: expertise and techniques of the self; international development 
programs in postsocialist countries; self-styling, advertising and consumerism; 
late- and postsocialist professional trajectories; theories of “public/private” 
and personhood; (neo)liberalism in nonliberal places; biopolitics and 
international health programs; gender studies, in particular postsocialist 
feminist interventions; secular and religious formations; the emergence of 
class difference under neoliberal conditions; institutionalized forms of ethnic 
and racial discrimination; the persistence of elites across political rupture, and 
other topics.

 

Please send a brief abstract and/or queries to Tomas Matza 
(tmatza at stanford.edu) and Natalia Roudakova (roudakov at stanford.edu) by 
Monday, March 26.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------