SANA 2004 Conference Theme:
Containment and
Transgression
(Francaise)
Some of the ways that anthropologists might
think about containments affecting post 9/11
North America could include:
- containment of racial and religious
minorities, immigrants, poor women and
children, and sexual minorities by
incarceration, policing, administration
(e.g., workfare) and surveillance under the
Patriot Act
- containment of working people by
"flexible" global labor processes
- containment of projected national
enemies (e.g. "rogue nations") by wars and
trade sanctions, and the related (self-)
containment created by militarizing
populations
- containment of genetic materials and
intellectual creativity by global
intellectual property laws or
corporate-university partnerships
At the same time, ways that anthropologists
might consider transgressions against such
containments could include:
- protest and national/transnational
organizing by new social movements of labor
and media activists, environmentalists,
racial minorities, women's rights groups,
sexual minorities, global-justice and human
rights activists
- illegal migration and smuggling of
illicit commodities across borders
- emergence of ecumenical faith-based
communities that call the ethics of "this
world" to account
- use of everyday weapons of the weak that
emphasize "the local," such as the voluntary
simplicity movement, vegetarianism, and
participation in local exchange economies
- organizing by proto-fascist and
fundamentalist movements reacting to the
instabilities associated with globalization
Containment and transgression might also
refer more broadly to:
- physical containment of others through
institutionalization
- ideological containment by the policing
of ideas
- self-containment by spatialized
"in-the-closet" practices or by bodily
disciplines
- institutional containments that
anthropologists experience in our research,
intellectual work, and teaching
- embodied transgressions of public and
private space
- individual transgressions against
institutional forms of control
- personal transgressions of public mores,
norms and conventional practices
- professional transgressions by which we
as anthropologists and others challenge the
corporate-university-military nexus
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