|
SCA Biannual
Meeting
"Sovereignty"
April 30 + May 1, 2004
Governor Hotel, Portland, OR
Conference Statement
It is commonplace to remark that globalization everyday rewrites
the bounds of politics, persons, and nature. As scholars we
are left to track and understand, necessarily, the artefacts
of these continual remakings.
Inviting the most compelling inquiries into emergent sovereignties
today, the SCA Spring 2004 meeting looks to provoke discussion
on social orders new and old.
Etymologies tell us that "sovereign," from the popular
Latin, superanus, marks the state of the sublime, the
sacred on earth, the above, but not quite. Over the last decade,
scholars have pressed at the limits of this mobile definition,
with its mix of divine promise and mortal panic. The sovereign
has the power to name, to mark reality, to establish coin, to
be the equivalence by which value is made. But the union of
reason, capital, and violence that normally endows sovereign
power is hardly economical. Sovereign markers create exceptions
and emergencies which exist both inside and outside of that
power. Sovereign markers excel, stand out, exceed, and overwhelm.
What are their premises, and what are their after-effects? In
what sense might sovereign power become a spectral presence
whose mimesis links it to powerful forgeries? When ideas of
the sacred are entwined with sovereign power, and life itself
becomes the sacred terrain for forms of governance, potentially
catastrophic regimes can emerge in the name of protecting “bare”
life. Debates about the legal ambiguities built into sovereignty,
in turn, raise questions about the violence afforded the modern
state toward its own citizens. But what of the potential disruptions
to this uneasy coherence of sovereignty and internal governance?
How are distinctive sovereignties differently localized or articulated
in relation to one another? How do the universalizing premises
of scholarship and politics of sovereignty get mobilized to
travel across differences, even as they are in constant reformulation
through those very encounters?
Among the themes invited for individual paper and panel proposals
are the intersections of power in places, bodies, and orders;
divinities; organized and disorganized religions; new imperialisms
and new NGO humanisms; the power to name; the making of rules
and the exceptions to rule; law, fear, and violence; security
and secrecy; the exclusions and inclusions of citizenship and
censorship; genders, sexualities, and the theory of rights;
queering sovereign realms; the implausibilities and excesses
that underscore power in its parodic realisms; coin, currency,
value and the transcendence of nation-state idioms in global
markets; scientific imaginaries and the rule of knowledge; spaces,
boundaries, and the markings of the deterritorial. In these
contexts, we ask where anthropology makes its voices in these
conversations, and what methods we take to better do our work.
In addition to proposed panels, featured speakers in organized
plenaries and workshops include: Ana Alonso, Veena Das, James
Ferguson, Saba Mahmood, Joe Masco, Bill Maurer, Elizabeth Povinelli,
and Kath Weston. The David Schneider Memorial Lecture will be
given by Mahmood Mamdani, with Paulla Ebron and Donald Moore
as discussants.
For more information, contact Bruce
Grant (Swarthmore C) or Lisa
Rofel (UC Santa Cruz), organizers.
|
