The University of Chicago Center in Beijing, Summer 2012 Anthropology Graduate Student Conference:
Space-time: Toward an Anthropology of Contemporaneity
Time:
August 24-25, 2012
Location:
The University of Chicago Center in Beijing
20th floor Culture Plaza
No. 59A Zhong Guan Cun Street
Haidian District Beijing 100872
People’s Republic of China
Topic:
Space-time: Toward an Anthropology of Contemporaneity
Organizers:
Zhiying Ma, Xueting Liu, Kiho Kim, Chen Chen, Victoria Nguyen, Jay Schutte, Miao Jenny Hua
For whom:
This conference is open to graduate students across all disciplines sharing ethnographic concerns. The conference organizers are a group of graduate students from the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology. We hope to open up a bilingual forum for the discussion of diverse range of Chinese anthropological concerns. We welcome abstracts addressing thematic issues including the following, informed by any combination of ethnic, urban, and rural field sites:
- Embodied temporalities in everyday life
- Spatialities/Governmentalities - city planning, rural development
- Ethnographic imaginaries of the Chinese rural
- “China Model” in political-economy/social sciences - as epistemic object, discourse and analytical category
- Regimes of value and knowledge, especially in the sciences
- Aspirations, desires, anxieties
The conference abstract is appended, and we highly encourage you take it into dialogue.
Please submit two abstracts in, English and Chinese, 250 words each. A CV or a one-page personal introduction, including research interests, should be submitted along with the abstracts. APPLICATIONS ARE DUE: June 22, 2012. Decisions will be made before July 13, 2012. Selected applicants will be expected to give a 15-20 minute presentation. The paper on which it is based will be circulated amongst panelists a week before the conference. The paper and presentation can be in either Chinese or English. Only the abstract needs to be submitted in both languages. The conference will provide lunch, but presenters should expect to take care of expenses for lodging and transportation.
Anthropology traverses vastly disparate geographies. Anthropologists "pitch their tents" to do fieldwork, and sit in “ivory towers” to write ethnographies, on disparate schedules. Can we make sense of our projects and our topics within a shared understanding of time? Are anthropologists “contemporaries” within the global diffusion of researchers and research subjects, universities and research centers?
We can no longer assume the unidirectional diffusion of anthropological methods from “the West” to field sites once seen as “peripheral” to “global centers;” such a familiar trajectory entrenched a “denial of coevalness” in some anthropology (Fabian, 1983). Postcolonial scholarship has done much to interrupt and even invert any such one-way passage from East to West, a process in which “raw” field data were once thought to become “cooked” ideas or knowledge only in a few languages and among a few expert groups. Now that an evolutionary concept of history has ceased to hold as the foundation upon which anthropology can ground its facts, these distances in space and time are closing. Contemporary anthropology suggests that the ex-centric sites of our many fields have become the principal places where capitalist modernity’s emergent formations are being configured. In other words, perhaps “the West” or global North is playing catch-up to the non-West or global South (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2011).
Building on these ideas, this conference accepts global ex-centricity, but presumes no necessary dissonance between East, West, North, South and Center as cardinal, geopolitical spaces. Much modernist anthropology/sociology of China, for instance, has separated the progressive and rationalized time of the modern city from the cyclical and poetic time of the countryside (Steinmuller, 2011). As we increasingly realize boundaries and trajectories of “culture” to be ideal types at best, how should anthropologists theorize the present? What can anthropologists contribute to studies of contemporary China, or other contemporary worlds, as we seek significance in places both more local and more global than the nation-state?
Anthropological exchange across the frontiers of languages and scholarly communities seeks to achieve a sociality of knowledgeable bodies rather than advance sovereign bodies of knowledge. In this conference we explore the ways in which the world-wide trajectory of anthropological knowledge-making can be considered and critiqued in its unfolding. We seek to occupy the boundary space of contemporaneity, at once evanescent and vanguard, together with Chinese graduate student researchers.
In this workshop, we welcome papers that address a broad range of topics included but not limited to the following:
- Embodied temporalities in everyday life
- Spatialities/Governmentalities - city planning, rural development
- Ethnographic imaginaries of the Chinese rural
- “China Model” in political-economy/social sciences - as epistemic object, discourse and analytical category
- Regimes of value and knowledge, especially in the sciences
