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SCA
Biennial Spring Meeting
“ Translations of Value”
May 5 + 6, 2006
Pfister Hotel
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Conference Program
Conference
Statement
Scholars
and activists concerned with contemporary globalization
have called attention to the long-distance, border-crossing
movements of capital, migrants, media, technology and ideology.
These movements describe an uneven and shifting topography,
a world that is anything but flat. Science studies and
ethnographies of capitalism have demonstrated, moreover,
that every instance of transportation is a translation.
As terms and objects are transmitted and translated between
material and cultural environments, their values shift
and mutate. Claims to authentic local character now ring
false in cultural anthropology; at the same time, the notion
of homogeneous global culture strikes anthropologists as
implausible.
The 2006 SCA conference theme invites participants to track, conceptually and
ethnographically, the networks of association through which people and things
create, recast, and contest economic and semiotic value(s). Contemporary networks – of
commodities and texts; institutional practices and facts; machines and maps – are
extensive in length yet very concrete. As Bruno Latour has observed, a rail
network (for instance) is “local at all points.” No matter how
far it reaches, “it is not universal enough to take you just anywhere.” Particular
networks materialize (or not) through particular translations. Translations
through networks are material transformations that persistently raise questions
of value: To whom? For what claims and representations? With what effects on
power, knowledge and subjectivity? What does it mean to create new forms of
value, new kinds of equivalence?
More specifically, plenary sessions, organized workshops, and conference papers
will address the following questions:
+What are the translations -- negotiations and calculations, accidents and
acts of violence -- by which people and things bind themselves and others into
networks and variously evaluate and qualify their ongoing relations?
+What forms and distributions of agency must be theoretically and empirically
envisioned in the course of analyzing networks and translations (e.g., in transnational
commodity chains and development projects)? When agents put objects and persons
into circulation, what powers are mobilized?
+ What diversities of the past are woven into contemporary translations of
value? How do historical terms and entities circulate in new forms within new
networks? What is conserved, and what destroyed, in translating historical
events, figures and experiences?
+What are the challenges, methodological and political as well as theoretical,
posed by tracking globalization to an anthropology committed to ethnographic
practice? Can political economic or semiotic approaches to value be productively
combined with the insights and methods of actor network theory?Possible paper
topics include:
Commodity and value chains
(agro-food and apparel commodity networks; techno-politics of supply chains
and quality standards; transnational advertising and local agencies; ethical
consumers and corporate citizens)
The social life/transnational traffic of things and persons
(labor migration; transnational adoption; repatriation of museum collections;
ecotourism and medical tourism; ethnological images in global circulation;
illicit trade in weapons and drugs; technology in military networks)
Politics of translation in scientific knowledge production
(entities and nomenclatures in basic science research; interplay of popular
norms and knowledge provider standards; research protocols in practice; networks
of commercial science)
Semiotic and linguistic value shifts
(literary translation as political and material practice; non-western fine
arts as consumer goods; transnational play of New Age terminologies and values;
journalistic translations of “the story” for home consumption;
international textbook controversies; new depictions of old wars; communicative
practices and intercultural encounters)
Transforming knowledge systems and local knowledges
(state-produced knowledge for international aid projects or for military use;
corporate research and expertise on new business environments; indigenous knowledge
as resource or resistance; commodification of experience and expertise in social
movements)
Transnational social/solidarity movements
(global Maoism; Zapatista transnationalism; international environmentalism;
transnational feminist activism; Fair Trade and No Sweat coalitions; the humanitarian
industry and mobile sovereignties; indigenous people’s movements)
Geographies of belonging and exclusion
(zones of security and stigma in global cities; border disputes and technologies
of policing; the political unconscious of new bourgeoisies; long distance nationalism)
Emerging methods and scales of ethnography
(cultural holism and the writing of multi-sited ethnography; collaboration
and fieldwork; the politics of authority in diversities of voice; history,
historicity, historical memory; fiction and the fashioning of ethnographic
realism)
* * *
Featured plenary speakers and workshop organizers include: Marisol
de la Cadena,
Lisa Cartwright, Elizabeth Dunn, Judith
Farquhar, Robert Foster, Rachael Stryker, Charis Thompson, Kay
Warren, Brad Weiss, and Sylvia Yanagisako.
The David Schneider Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Timothy
Mitchell of New York University.
* * *
For more information, please contact the conference co-organizers: Judith
Farquhar (Chicago) and Robert
Foster (Rochester).
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The
spectacular Santiago Calatrava addition to the