The Society for the Anthropology of Europe will hold a
luncheon from 12pm to 2pm on Saturday at the San Jose
McEnery Convention Center. Each discussion leader will
be at a separate table with up to 7 participants. The
cost for tickets will be $30; $10 for students. Use
the advance registration form on the AAA website [
http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/2006/reg.htm ]to buy a
ticket. Indicate your table selection in order of
preference in the spaces provided on the form.
Reservations are filled on a first come, first serve
basis. Ticket cancellations are non-refundable.
Tickets will be mailed two weeks before the meeting.
Organizer: Sascha Goluboff (Washington and Lee
University).
The topics to be discussed and hosts for each
roundtable are:
Table 1 - CULTURAL POLICY IN THE NEW EUROPE
Moderator: Jennifer Cash (University of Pittsburgh)
Europe has not been bypassed by the increase in
international attention to cultural protection and
preservation. Rather, “cultural policy” holds an
important place in the toolkit of “Europeanization”
programs and processes, even in countries not acceding
to the European Union. Cultural policy is also one of
the means through which individual countries are
negotiating their national identities and agendas
within the new Europe. The discussion at this
roundtable will focus on the tensions between European
and national agendas related to “culture,” and the
role of anthropology in this emerging form of identity
politics. Individuals interested in the organization
and financing of arts and culture, heritage protection
and preservation, tourism, media, and minority rights
are encouraged to participate.
Table 2 - SPEAKING BACK TO ANTHROPOLOGY: HOW TO PITCH
YOUR PROJECT BEYOND A EUROPEANIST AUDIENCE
Moderator: Jessica Greenberg (University of Chicago)
As anthropologists, conversations beyond our areas of
regional expertise often draw into focus the
theoretical and political stakes of our projects, and
reveal how our particular cases give new insight into
global transformations in social, political and
economic life. This roundtable begins from the premise
that areas of investigation such as the state,
citizenship, religion, social movements,
multiculturalism, race, ethnicity in Europe are
critical to anthropology more generally. However, for
graduate students, it is often frustrating to develop
conceptual frameworks that do justice to the
specificity of our field-sites while articulating the
relevance of our projects to a broader audience. This
roundtable will be an opportunity for younger
anthropologists working in European contexts to do
just that. We will begin by asking what is an
anthropology in and of Europe and by thinking about
the larger social and political transformations in
Europe that help us bridge traditional divides of
east/west and EU/non-EU. How do the way political and
social changes play out in Europe give us insight into
areas of central theoretical concern for anthropology?
Throughout the roundtable each participant will have
an opportunity to present his or her work briefly.
Then the group will brainstorm about how to ‘pitch’
projects to a larger audience. In exploring the
conceptual relevance of our work, we will also discuss
how we can make an anthropology in and of Europe speak
to the discipline.
Table 3 - SEXUALITIES AND POSTSOCIALIST
TRANSFORMATIONS
Moderator: Hadley Z. Renkin (University of Michigan)
The fifteen years since the collapse of socialism have
seen the emergence of a sophisticated anthropological
literature on the various “transitions.” A critical
aspect of these transformations has been the
relationship of these countries and their cultural
changes to “Europe” – increasingly defined by the
European Union. Surprisingly, sexuality and sexual
politics have been largely neglected by this
literature, with sexual-political movements typically
viewed as indicators of either success or failure to
conform to “European” values of tolerance, democracy,
and civil society. Yet such issues are particularly
relevant now. Lesbians and gays in postsocialist
countries are challenging current cultural-political
reconfigurations, and there have been homophobic
responses to Pride Marches in Poland and Latvia that
have not gone unnoticed by the EU. In all these
activities, and in their everyday lives, lesbians and
gays struggle for inclusion while balancing public and
private, and national and transnational, identities,
perspectives, and influences. Sexuality and sexual
politics are therefore fascinating sites for exploring
issues central to postsocialism: shifting
subjectivities, the ambiguities of civil society, and
the meanings of belonging. This workshop will
interrogate current understandings of postsocialism
through the lens of sexuality. We will ask: What can
the changing sexual subjectivities – normative as well
as alternative – of postsocialist societies tell us
about their transformations? What can theories of
sexuality, and work on sexuality elsewhere in Europe,
contribute to our understandings of postsocialism? How
can sexual politics reveal unconsidered aspects of
emerging relations between old and new EU
member-states?
Table 4 - EURASIA AND ENVIRONMENT
Moderator: Katherine Metzo (UNC-Charlotte)
This roundtable centers on the intersection of two
related themes: threats to “traditional” lifestyle and
transboundary environmental crises. I use
“traditional” rather than “indigenous” to acknowledge
the historical movements of different peoples across
Eurasia and the presence of blended subsistence and
economic systems that combine elements of indigenous
practices with those of more recent arrivals.
Questions we will consider include the local
implications of global climate change for livelihood
strategies, the impact of foreign demand for natural
resources whose extraction results in permanent
changes to landscapes and lifestyles, the promotion of
sustainable development projects and local perceptions
about land use and the creation of new conservation
areas.
Table 5 - Not Available this year.
Table 6 - FAITHS OF OUR FATHERS: RELIGIONS AND
MODERNITIES IN THE “NEW” EUROPE
Moderator: Liam D. Murphy (California State
University, Sacramento)
Contemporary social critics and philosophers have long
since alerted anthropologists to the dangers of
viewing the emergence of “modernity” in Europe and
elsewhere as a simple rupture with archaic,
“pre-modern” modes of worldview and political-economic
practice. Instead, we are advised by such diverse
theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu and
Anthony Giddens to consider the hybrid and inherently
variable nature of the modern world as it emerges in
differing socio-cultural and historical contexts.
Fuelled by globalizing processes of knowledge
dispersal, partial, ongoing transformations in
regional culture across the “new” Europe – itself an
inchoate project of modern rationality and its
discontents – have had special relevance for the
anthropological investigation of religion. Viewed by
some as a discarded artifact of an atavistic
pre-modernity, religious faith and practice are
nostalgically viewed by others as the traces of a lost
golden age of dogmatic certainty and moral clarity.
The problematic character of European religion in
relation to modernity is complicated by its
ideological intersection with ethnonationalism (for
instance, in Northern Ireland, Poland, and the former
Yugoslavia), its status as a marker of Otherness
within EU member states (attested to by the widespread
rioting by disenfranchised Muslim youth in France),
and – most disturbingly – its implication as a
justification for insurgent and terrorist campaigns
(the effects of which have been most recently
witnessed in London and Madrid, but which for years
have afflicted citizens of Belfast and the Basque
region, among others). Less dramatically, but of no
less consequence for European subjects, the emergence
of various evangelical, charismatic, and “new age”
movements signals a re-working of religion to meet the
intellectual and emotional needs of Europeans
“disenchanted” with what Giddens has referred to as
the “consequences of modernity.” In this round-table,
we will discuss the implications of such hybrid forms
of knowledge and practice for the future of both
religion and modernity in the twenty-first century
European Union.
Table 7 - EXCLUSIONARY PROJECTS IN THE NEW EUROPE:
DISCUSSING THE IMPACT OF ANTI-SEMITISM AND
ISLAMOPHOBIA ON EUROPEAN SOCIETY
Moderator: Matti Bunzl (UIUC)
This roundtable will discuss current trajectories and
possible outcomes of exclusionary projects in the new
Europe. Taking Bunzl’s article “Between Anti-Semitism
and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe”
(American Ethnologist 32:4, 2005) as a starting point,
we will talk about the problematics of categorizing
contemporary discrimination against Muslims within the
European Union project, the differences between “old”
and “new” Anti-Semitism, the dialects between hostile
and positive images of Jews and Israel among political
elites, and the role of Christianity in creating
contemporary European society. We will also discuss
the appropriateness of using American categorizes such
as race, the war on terror, and fundamentalism to
understand these cultural and political
transformations.
