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Life and Death: A Conversation
Society for Cultural Anthropology
The Providence Biltmore Hotel
Providence, Rhode Island
May 11-12, 2012
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a PDF of the program here]
[download
the 1-page Schedule-at-a-Glance here]
Locations TBA
Friday, May 11
8:30am—10:15am
Plenary Conversation I
Location: Grand Ballroom
Eric Fassin (Ecole Normale Supérieure)
Lawrence Cohen (UC Berkeley)
Chair: Jennifer Cole (U Chicago)
Friday, May 11
10:30am—12:15pm
Photo-Essays: Seas of Change in Coastal Louisiana: Documenting Life, Loss, and Landscape
Location: Salon 6
Jessica Schexnayder (LSU/Louisiana Sea Grant College Program): Shrimp Boats, Swing Sets and Voodoo Dolls: Cemeteries of Coastal Louisiana
Rebecca Carter (Brown U): Life and Death on Fragile Ground: A Photo-Essay and Guided Expedition from New Orleans to the Birdfoot Delta
Discussant: Donald W. Davis (Louisiana Sea Grant College Program)
Organizers: Rebecca Carter (Brown U) and Jessica Schexnayder (Louisiana Sea Grant College Program)
Subjects of, Subjects to Death
Location: Renaissance Salon
Hoon Song (U Minnesota): The Giant of a King’s Second Body at Kim Jong-Il’s Funeral
Marilyn Ivy (Columbia U): Deathly Instantiations: Writing the Japanese Disaster of 2011
Ozge Serin (Columbia University): Writing, Dying: On the Death Fast in Turkish Prisons
Jean M. Langford (U Minnesota): Non-Death of the Near-Human
Organizers: Jean Langford (U Minnesota) and Hoon Song (U Minnesota)
Humanitarian Residue: the Moral Politics of Saving Lives
Location: Salon 2
Cristiana Giordano (UC Davis): The Cannibal State: Including and ‘Digesting’ the Other in Contemporary Italy
Saida Hodzic (Cornell U): The Value of Freedom: The Social Life of Ghana’s Criminal Code Act 484
Bianca Dahl (Brown U): The NGO as Sugar Daddy: The Moral Meets the Material in a Botswana Orphan Care Program
Crystal Biruk (Brown U): Soap, Bloodsuckers, and Surveys: Moral Economies of AIDS Survey Research in Malawi
Discussant: Jennifer Cole (U Chicago)
Organizers: Saida Hodzic (Cornell U) and Bianca Dahl (Brown U)
Grey Areas and Ultimates, in Living Color
Location: Grand Ballroom
Judith Farquhar (U Chicago): Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Rocio Magaña (Rutgers U): Crossing Thresholds: Migrants between Life, Death, the U.S., and Mexico
Kristina Lyons (UC Davis): Soils, Shared Bodies and Stamina: Life and Death in the Colombian Amazon
Alex Blanchette (U Chicago): Maximizing Life on the American Factory Farm
Kregg Hetherington (Dalhousie U): From Cultivation to Protection: The Preservation of Life takes over the Paraguayan Farm
Tatiana Chudakova (U Chicago): The Afterlife of the Soviet State: Logics of Rebirth, Accumulation and Scarcity in Russian Buddhism
Organizer: Judith Farquhar (U Chicago)
Friday, May 11
12:15pm-1:00pm
Lunch Break
Friday, May 11
1:00pm-2:45pm
Living with Dead Futures
Location: Salon 6
Elayne Oliphant (U Chicago): Faith in an Absent Future
Pascal Gaudette (McGill U): Persistence of Form: African Ballet After the Death of Colonial, Socialist and Developmental Futures
Kathryn Goldfarb (U Chicago): Former Child in a World of Adults: Troubled Transformations in a Tokyo Self-Support Group
Eli Thorkelson (U Chicago): Hostile Futures: Temporal Conflict, a Break in the Everyday, and its Aftermath in the 2009 French University Strikes
Talia Weiner (U Chicago): Temporalities of Agency: Managing Bipolar Disorder in the Face of Uncertain Future Selfhood
Discussant: Danilyn Rutherford (UC Santa Cruz)
Organizer: Eli Thorkelson (U Chicago)
Transforming Mortuary Rituals: East and West
Location: Renaissance Salon
Lucia Huwy-min Liu (Boston U): Dying Socialist in Capitalist Shanghai: Memorial Meetings, Death Rituals, and Perceptions of Self in Urban Shanghai
Ruth Toulson (U Wyoming): Luxuries for the Dead: New Memorialization in Singapore
Jenny Huberman (U Missouri-Kansas City): Forever a Fan: Reflections on the Branding of Death and the Production of Value
Jeff Bennett (U Missouri-Kansas City): From Monuments to Megapixles: Remembering the Dead in Modern America
Caroline Schuster (U Chicago): Debt Forgiveness: On Microfinance and Mortuary Practice
Organizer: Jenny Huberman (U Missouri-Kansas City)
Life Cycles of Resource Extraction: Lives, Deaths and Afterlives for Mining Communities and Commodities
Location: Salon 2
David Kneas (Yale U): Chronic Potential: Unfulfilled Dreams of Mining in Ecuador
Tom Schilling (MIT): Between the Mines: Geological Data in Life and Death
Joshua Z. Walker (U Chicago): Living in a “Future Ghost Town”: Diamonds and the Lifecourse of a Congolese Mining Community
Lindsay A. Bell (U Toronto): Resuscitating the Ruins: Mining Impermanence in Canada’s North
Discussant: Rosalind Morris (Columbia U)
Organizers: Joshua Z. Walker (U Chicago) and Lindsay A Bell (U Toronto)
Consuming Death
Location: Grand Ballroom
Noelle Molé (Princeton U): Italy’s zombie-workers and the Contested Soul
Harris Solomon (Duke U): Fat Territory: "Globesity" and the Bodily Politics of Comparison in India
Kim Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute): Making Environmental Sense: To Eat, or not to Eat?
Discussant: Brad Weiss (College of William & Mary)
Organizer: Harris Solomon (Duke U)
Friday, May 11
3:00pm- 4:45pm
Sociality and Deathly Solitude: on Life, Death and Being Alone
Location: Grand Ballroom
Zoë H. Wool (Rutgers U): Precarious Solitude: Deadly Attachments and Life Preserving Aloneness at a U.S. Military Hospital
Kenneth MacLeish (Rutgers U): Logics of Military Suicide
Anne Alison (Duke U): Sharing Death as a Form of Sociality in Post Postwar Japan
Julie Livingston (Rutgers U): Figuring the Tumor
Organizers: Zoë H. Wool (Rutgers U) and Kenneth MacLeish (Rutgers U)
Robots, Zombies, Ghosts
Location: Salon 2
Kelly Ladd (York U): Animals as Instruments: Biomimetic Noses and the War on Terror
Heather Myers (Harvard U): Crawling Off the Screen: An Ethnography of Live Action Zombie Events in the United States
Larisa Kurtovic (UC Berkeley): A Zombie State: On Everyday Politics and the Condition of Perpetual Deferral in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina
Aaron Goodfellow (John Hopkins U): I´m a Slave to the Grind: Enslavement, Chemical Dependency and the Sovereignty of the Will
Politics of Containment in/between Life and Death
Location: Renaissance Salon
Carlo Caduff (U Zurich): Of Mimicry and Microbes
Emily Cohen (Columbia U): Amputations and Anesthesia: Changing Notions of Life, Death, and Human Consciousness in a Colombian Military Hospital
Angie Heo (Emory U): Relics as Containers in Cults of Life and Death
Maria José de Abreu (U Lisbon): Specters of Indebtedness in Portuguese Society
Vibeke Pihl (U Copenhagen): Multiple Lives and Singular Deaths - Exploring the Use of Pigs as Model Organisms in Biomedical Research on Human Health
Coleman Nye (Brown U): When Survival Isn’t Soon Enough: Tracing the Emergence of Immaterial Disease
Organizers: Maria José de Abreu (U Lisbon) and Angie Heo (Emory U)
The Curve of Life: What Lies Ahead?
Location: Salon 6
Mike Sutherland (U Massachusetts-Amherst): Potential for Dystopia
Eric Griffith (U Massachusetts-Amherst): Questioning the World I Will Inherit
Virginia Cornue (Rutgers U): Why China’s Global Encompassment Matters in Matters of Life, Living and Death
David Nixon (Town Administrator, Hadley Massachusetts): A View of the Future from Town Hall
Organizer: Ken Jacobson (Boston U)
Friday, May 11
5:00pm- 6:30pm
Plenary Conversation II
Location: Garden Room
Erica Bornstein (U Wisconsin Milwaukee)
Ilana Feldman (George Washington U)
Chair: Peter Redfield (UNC Chapel Hill)
Saturday, May 12
8:30am—10:15am
Plenary Conversation III
Location: Grand Ballroom
Laura Bear (LSE)
Gillian Feeley-Harnik (U Michigan)
Chair: Danilyn Rutherford (UC Santa Cruz)
Saturday, May 12
10:30am—12:15pm
Deadly Geographies: Political Violence, Sovereign Power, and the Making of Selfhood and Territory in Comparative Perspectives
Location: Salon 6
Hafeez Jamali (U Texas Austin): Deadly Dreams: Cultivating Desire in a Fearful and Anxious City in Pakistan
Jaime Amparo Alves (U Texas Austin): Living-in-Death: Black Suffering, Sovereign Power and Racial Anthropophagy in Urban Brazil
Shubh Mathur (New School for Social Research): Maps as Prison: Indian Strategies of Control in the Borderlands
Ahmed Dardir (Columbia U): Nahr al Barid: Necropolitics, Exception, and the Production of Docile Patriots
Jonah Steinberg (U Vermont): Of Labor and Ungrievable Death: Precarious Life and Solo Children on Delhi’s Streets
Organizer: Hafeez Jamali (U Texas Austin)
Life After: Institutional Transitions and the Problem of Social Death
Location: Renaissance Salon
Nandi Dill (NYU): Becoming a Veteran: An Ethnography of the Routes Former Combat Soldiers Take After Service
Leyla Savloff (U Washington): How the Paths Get Chosen: Contribution as Neoliberal Productivity/Life after Social Death
Anna Zogas (U Washington): Mechanism of Injury: mTBI, Medical Uncertainty, and the U.S. Military Healthcare Bureaucracy
Discussants: Catherine Lutz (Brown U) and Zoë Wool (Rutgers U)
Organizer: Leyla Savloff (U Washington)
Trauma Effects: Interpreting the Intersection of Trauma, Psychosocial Interventions, and Humanitarian Praxis
Location: Salon 2
Sharon Abramowitz (U Florida): Producing Peace Subjectivities: Trauma Effects and Psychosocial Intervention in Post-Conflict Liberia
Neil Aggarwal (Columbia U): Psychosocial or Sociopolitical Rehabilitation? De-Radicalization Programs in the War on Terror
Catherine Panter-Brick (Yale U): Setting a Mental Health Agenda in Humanitarian Settings: Why Resilience Matters
Saiba Varma (Cornell U): We are All Doctor Sahabs': Counselors as Psychiatrists in Indian-Administered Kashmir
Patricia Omidian (Medical Anthropologist and Consultant): Where Trauma is Normal: Psychosocial Interventions that Rebuild Communities in Afghanistan
Discussant: Mariella Pandolfi (U Montréal)
Organizer: Sharon Abramowitz (U Florida)
Life of Things
Location: Grand Ballroom
Andrea Ballestero (Arizona State U): How do Beets and Pantyhose Make Water (Un)Affordable?
Mary Leighton (U Chicago): Between Agentive Data and Dead Cultures: What is Archaeology's Object?
Tim Choy (UC Davis): Atmospherics: On Substances and Subjects in Suspension
Sarah Wylie (The Public Library for Open Technology and Science; RISD Digital + Media Department): Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science: Open-Source Development of Tools for Grassroots Science
Chris Kortright (UC Davis): Evolutionary Interventions: When Gas Produces the World
Discussant: Stuart McLean (U Minnesota)
Organizer: Chris Kortright (UC Davis)
Saturday, May 12
12:15pm—1:00pm
Lunch Break
Saturday, May 12
1:00pm—2:45pm
Roundtable on Work, Lives, and Death in Alternative Careers
Location: Grand Ballroom
Charlie Piot and Anne Allison (Duke U)
John Jackson (U Pennsylvania)
Chris Walley (MIT)
Mike Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Chris Kortright (UC Davis)
Brad Weiss (College of William & Mary)
Organizers: Michelle Stewart (U Regina) and Kim Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Generation Ex: National Imaginaries, Moral Pedagogies, and Fantasies of Generational Extinction
Location: Salon 2
Betsey Brada (Princeton U): Chronicle of a Death Forestalled: Reckoning Survival in Botswana’s “Time of AIDS”
Brady G'sell (U Michigan): In Cash Only: The Power of “Maintenance” in South Africa and the Production of Economic Kinship among a Generation of Transition
Brian Horne (U Chicago): Raising the Living by Raising the "Dead": Tuning Post-Soviet Generations to the Music of Soviet Bards
Kathryn McHarry (U Chicago): The Risks of Renaissance: Inversions of Age and Political Legitimacy in Senegal
Aaron Seaman (U Chicago): “Generation Alzheimer's?” Figuring Families in the Midst of an Epidemic
Discussant: Sarah Lamb (Brandeis U)
Organizer: Aaron Seaman (U Chicago)
Life Extended
Location: Renaissance Salon
Jeremy Trombley (U Maryland, College Park): Extending Ecologies: An Anthropology of Life Support Systems
Abou Ali Farman Farmaian (Purchase College, SUNY): Immortalist Selves, Technological Transcendence and Secular Finitude
Jennie Doberne (U Virginia): Family Retrieved: Single Motherhood and Posthumous Sperm Donation in Israel
Stacey Langwick (Cornell U): The Cup of Life: Wondering about the Fidelity of Traditional Medicines in Tanzania
Amy Den Ouden (U Massachusetts, Boston): The Gendered Structure of Life and Death on Reservations: Indigenous Women and Land Rights in Eighteenth Century Connecticut
Saturday, May 12
3:00pm-4:45pm
Making Moral, Political, and Existential Worlds in South Asia
Location: Salon 6
Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College): Poeisis in Life and Death
Naveeda Khan (Johns Hopkins U): Riparians Ponder the Death of the River
Diane Mines (Appalachian State U): The Dead on the Edge of a Forest in South India, and a Place to Live
Margaret Trawick (Massey U): Death and Life in Batticaloa
Discussant: Martha Selby (U Texas Austin)
Organizer: Sarah Lamb (Brandeis U)
Afterlife
Location: Grand Ballroom
Stuart McLean (U Minnesota): Storied Afterlives and Ancestral Imaginings
Meryl Lodge (U Minnesota): The Post-Apocalyptic Potential of Trash: The Sociality of Afterlife in Jill Sigman's Hut Project
Juan Obarrio (Johns Hopkins U): Return to the Landscape of Health
Matthew Watson (North Carolina State U): Newtons and Apes: Questioning Biocentrism and the Multispecies Turn
Monika Gagnon (Concordia U): Posthumous Cinema
Thorbjorg Jonsdottir (California Institute of the Arts): Film Screening: Ocean, Ocean
Organizer: Stuart McLean (U Minnesota)
What Counts as an Emergency and Whose Emergencies Count?
Location: Salon 2
Peter Locke (Princeton U): Surviving the Aftermath: Trauma, Resilience, and Chronic Insecurity in Postwar Sarajevo
Jody Roberts (Chemical Heritage Foundation): Seeing Risk and Planning Response: the Proposed (and Failed) Attempt to Ban Asbestos in the U.S.
Beth Hallowell (U Pennsylvania): “Thinking in an (Obstetrical) Emergency”: Maternal Life, Public Health Planning, and “Planes de Emergencia” in Rural Guatemala
Britt Dahlberg (U Pennsylvania): Asbestos as Problem of the Past, or Present Emergency? Transforming Gradual Contamination into an Urgent and Current Disaster
Grant Otsuki (U Toronto): Death, Decline, or “Reversible Destiny”: Narratives and Embodied Experiences of Emergency in Japan
Discussant: Lundy Braun (Brown U)
Organizers: Beth Hallowell (U Pennsylvania) and Britt Dahlberg (U Pennsylvania)
Kinship Chronotopes
Location: Renaissance Salon
Christopher Ball (Dartmouth College): Avoidance as Alterity Stance: Naming in a Xinguan Chronotope of Affinity
Nicholas Harkness (Harvard U): Intimacy, Status, and the Contradictions of Christian Kinship in South Korea
Janet McIntosh (Brandeis U): The Tempopolitics of Kinship In Contemporary White Kenyan Identity
Shunsuke Nozawa (IES Abroad Tokyo): Engendering Sociality: Phatic Traces in Japan
Danilyn Rutherford (UC Santa Cruz): Kinship and Catastrophe: Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Descent
Discussant: Asif Agha (U of Pennsylvania)
Organizers: Christopher Ball (Dartmouth College) and Nicholas Harkness (Harvard U)
Saturday, May 12
5:00pm-6:30pm
David Schneider Memorial Lecture
Location: Grand Ballroom
Joao Biehl (Princeton U)
Vinh-Kim Nguyen (U Montréal)
Chair:Brad Weiss (College of William & Mary)
Saturday, May 12
6:45pm-7:30pm
Reception
Location: L'Apogee
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