2010 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting
Theme: Circulation
In 2010, the AAA will meet in New Orleans, where the river meets the
sea. New Orleans channels flows into the heart of a continent, and out
across oceans, around the globe. The boundary between river and sea;
among earth, water, and even air, is shifting and unclear. The
circulation of people and other living organisms, of material things,
and of ideas in such zones of passage constitutes some of the central
social and physical processes of concern to all kinds of
anthropologists, historically and in the present.
New Orleans has inspired the theme for the 2010 meetings:
"circulation" is meant to inspire us to think about what happens when
movement is the organizing trope of our questions, our methodologies,
our analyses and our accounts. We can think in terms of circulation
across time as well as across space; through different kinds of
organizing principles; in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers,
facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows, what is at stake for
whom in these processes, and what their consequences might be, for
humans and for the environment. It opens up questions about what
exactly circulates: signs? objects? bodies? Do different things
circulate in different ways? Do they change or remain constant? What
new phenomena, new arrangements and new inequalities, does circulation
produce? How are resources, and ways of understanding them,
identified, made sense of, produced and distributed in the process?
How (and why) do rates and types of circulation vary across time and
space? What crystallizes and what continues to flow and re-shape?
"Circulation" also invites us to think across boundaries, whether
those are boundaries organizing phenomena we seek to describe and
explain, boundaries within and across disciplines, or boundaries among
anthropologists or other social groups, and along various kinds of
organizing principles. It turns our attention to zones of encounter,
conjunctions and liminal passages.
It also requires us to ask whether "circulation" is a helpful trope
for the production of anthropological knowledge. What light does it
shed on the (increasingly widely circulating) concept of "culture",
arguably the central organizing construct of anthropology? And on
anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers from the perspectives of
all subfields and forms of anthropological practice, or across them,
investigating this theme with data, method and theory oriented to all
temporal and spatial horizons.
Come and participate in the circulation of ideas
For more information on the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting, watch http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/ for official conference information.
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