CFP, AAA 2017: Vernacular(izing) world-systems analysis: Anticipating change within and beyond global capitalism (Washington DC, Nov 29-Dec 3)

Jacob Nerenberg Announcement
Location
District of Columbia, United States
Subject Fields
Anthropology

Vernacular(izing) world-systems analysis: Anticipating change within and beyond global capitalism

Panel organizer: Jacob Nerenberg, University of Toronto

Anthropology has a complicated relationship with world-systems analysis. Research agendas have tended to focus on the experiences of populations relegated to a peripheral situation by core production monopolies. Despite a legacy of anthropological scholarship that has elucidated the dynamics of such processes of relegation, it has become common for anthropologists to repudiate world-systems analysis for supposedly imposing a static core-periphery model on a refractory world. This panel aims to renew the relevance of world-systems analysis in anthropology by drawing on two of its neglected features: 1) its model of global systemic crisis and transition into a time after capitalism, and 2) its genealogy in Immanuel Wallerstein’s conversations with anti-imperialist liberation movements. The panel will gather ethnographic case studies that show how people whose political and economic lives are constrained by global capitalism are themselves engaging in analysis of those global forces, the constraints they impose, their impressive durability, and their eventual decline. This is somewhat consonant with the Comaroffs’ (2012) agenda of ‘theory from the South’, and other efforts to consider ethnographic informants as theorists in their own right. The panel is motivated by a conviction that anthropological theory can be enriched by documenting the knowledge produced by those in the world-system most severely affected by its   material patterns of encompassment and peripheralization.

A number of important anthropological works have considered the subjects of ethnography as bearers of knowledge about global forces: from Tsing’s (2005) attention to vernacular ideas about the extractive frontier in relation to globalization; to Lattas’ (2010) interpretation of cargo movements as intellectual practices that grapple with enduring structures of imperial race and technology. This panel brings such tendencies into conversation with inter-scalar and global analysis of modalities of production and distribution through which arenas of national, regional, or local ‘politics’ are enacted and constrained. This mode of analysis is indebted to the legacy of political economy in anthropology—from Mintz and Wolf to Kahn and Guyer—and its debates about articulated modes of production and relations across scales. We suspect that one reason for the disciplinary waning of such modes of analysis is the awareness that the organizing forces of global capitalism have been entering the kind of terminal crisis that Wallerstein predicted. This panel is particularly interested in ethnographic explorations that show individuals and groups theorizing their communities’ political horizons in relation to a coming decline of capitalism and a re-ordering of global power relations. These range from religious discourses that meld eschatological ideas with critique of inequalities; to generational divergences surrounding the possibility of a protective and redistributive State; practices of speculation about the instability of given places’ or groups’ status as ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’; or social movement discourses anticipating the onset of systemic crisis and a post-capitalist future. Overall, the panel aspires to create a space for rigorous and playful consideration of world-systems analysis as at once a productive body of academic theory and a plural constellation of vernacular knowledge—capable of stirring conversations that can increase the relevance of anthropology.

Contact Information

Please send paper abstracts (max. 250 words), no later than Thurs. April 6, to:

Contact Email
jacob.nerenberg@mail.utoronto.ca