Friday, April 7 and Saturday, April 8 2006 |
overview conference statement Rhetorics and regimes of ‘the globe’ claim a logic and coherence that are at once evaluative and prescriptive of a universal reality. From invocations of the ‘end of history’ to incantations of post-socialism, democratization and neoliberalism, the language of ‘the global’ imagines the world as a seamless whole. Implied in this coherent universe are integrated political economic regimes in which individuated, rational subjects make up harmonized national and transnational populations. In examining these claims, social scientists often reify their coherence and reach; our criticisms of global projects make counter-claims that can reinforce the very orderliness we attempt to contest. Within the discourses of world-making projects and the knowledge production they inspire are disorderly and contested relations of power, subjectivity, violence, affect, civil society, governmentality, and beauty. The Anthropology of Global Productions will explore such discourses of world-ordering. If anthropology often seeks to disaggregate and disable these discourses, we aim to understand both the content and the effects of these disaggregations. We wish to raise theoretical and methodological questions about our own contributions as knowledge producers. How do we investigate the patchwork quilt of lived realities in a way that engages those making global generalizations? How do we strengthen the knowledge of grounded practices in a way that speaks effectively to and in debates about the globe? What claims and interventions can we make through ethnographic research? sponsors |
| home | overview | program | discussants | papers | alumni | contact |