AAA 2006: Late Observations

Pace Rex (see below), I liked the venue. While clearly, the central meeting bar was missed, I thought the gigantic nature of the main meeting hall was welcome. I can recall Hiltons and Marriotts past where the multi-level and fragmented layout of the meeting meant that you never could get a sense of the enormity of the thing. (An exception might be the Logan’s Run Hyatt in New Orleans: Who doesn’t love 20-story atriums with glass-walled elevators whirring up and down?) Above all, I soaked up the sunshine. Monday morning waiting for my flight out of SF, I sat outside the ferry building looking at the Bay Bridge, an enormous and beautiful grey steel structure that disappeared into fog. San Francisco is, Mark Twain once said, a ‘good grey city.’ San Jose on the other hand seemed balmy, warm, almost tropical. I saw at least one anthropologist in San Jo visiting from warmer climes who didn’t even need to change out of his sandles (that was you Rex). Against the golden sunshine of Silicon Valley, the rather dour uniform of the visiting scholars seemed somewhat out of place. Can anthropologists wear color? Roy Wagner’s bright orange tie notwithstanding (along with his matching verse-as-discussion), I wondered whether or not the generally dark selection of colors reflected a lack of sunny disposition amongst presenters. (A further exception worth noting: Francoise Dussart’s lovely hibiscus(?)-themed blouse at the Nancy Munn panel.)

A further note: San Jose as a venue seemed at odds with the ‘theme’ of the meeting (Critical Intersections). That theme evoked images of bad street corners, professors caught having turned the wrong direction when leaving the Hilton, and ending up not in Union Square, but on Leavenworth & Geary, accosted or solicited by tranny hookers and other denizens of central San Francisco. San Jose presents rather different dangerous intersections: namely, the hegemony of the left turn lane with dedicated left turn signal. I thought I’d never make it catty-corner across that intersection.

But, what were people talking about?

Clearly, things neoliberal have reached their zenith. We’re devoting ever more attention to the ‘state,’ even as we claim that it seems less and less relevant (by design) to the government of social life. How many panels featured ‘neoliberal’ in the title? I’m too lazy to count. Having abandoned the spendlid color and dress of ritual for the uniform of the bureaucratic (see above), are anthropologists tired of talking about the vibrant values that animate social life the world over? I saw some exceptions, I think. Among them: Lorimer on the colors of thought (or brains) presented in Chicago museum exhibitions, Kulick on animal (dis)pleasure in popular and subcultural representations of orgasm, Feld on the avian perspectivism of Kaluli self-other dialectics.

For me, the most challenging panel was Hirschkind and Mahmood’s “Theologies of the Political.” It was challenging in part because it required more than passing acquaintance with the likes of Levinas and Agamben. Further, I couldn’t wrap my head around what the presenters (Hirschkind, Mahmood, Faubion, Butler) were arguing. The background for the panel appeared to be contemporary contestation within publics about religion and government, especially where Islam is involved. Here is part of the panel abstract:

It is evident to the participants on this panel that in order to go beyond pious assertions of the moral superiority of the secular vision of ‘the good life,’ it is incumbent upon us to collectively explore the resources and strategies that secular liberal practices of governance (rather than ideal-typical models or ideological self-understandings thereof) offer for imagining another vision of a peaceful polity, one in which, importantly, confessional differences and theological presuppositions are part of the fabric of public debate.

During the discussion it struck me that, in critiquing certain divisions between the political and the theological, the panelists seemed (with the exception of Faubion, I suspect) to restrain the terms of the ‘debate’ to that given by the ostensive content of those rubrics. Which is to say: There seems something problematic about criticizing or re-thinking secular ideology within the terms generated by a secular-religious dyad. I wanted the panelists to come at the problem more obliquely. I wondered how their critiques would look, for example, from the perspective of someone concerned about legal recognition of same-sex unions. But I’m perfectly willing to admit that I had trouble following the papers and would very much appreciate feedback from readers who might have had a firmer grip on their content.

Like Rex, I spent some time in the book exhibit. I snatched up new books by Paige West, Stuart Kirsch, Josesph Masco, and Donald Moore. On reflection, I realize that each of these new volumes pertains to the politics of ecology in a sense, but I didn’t plan it that way and so am wondering if I have inadvertantly sampled a trend.

In any case, if San Jose is sunny, Helsinki is not. The dark encroaches: days shrink. Finns compensate with liberal consumption of coffee and chocolate. I find myself looking forward to hibernation of a sort.

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.