106th AAA Annual Meeting Nov 28 - Dec 2 Washington, DC
106th AAA Annual Meeting Nov 28 - Dec 2 Washington, DC
Difference, (In)equality & Justice
Faye V Harrison
2007 Executive Program Chair
Anthropology has historically had a commitment to analyzing human differences. The differences we study range from biologically endowed variations in skeletal biology and DNA to socially constructed, culturally elaborated and politically mediated heterogeneities manifest both within and across human societies. Complex ethnic, linguistic and religious pluralisms, intersecting forms of racial and class stratification, and gender and sexual hierarchies are significant and commonly volatile features within societies and across the national and transnational landscapes where they are mapped.
Mapping Difference and Inequality
Within the broad continuum of differences that anthropological analysis discerns are both the relatively innocuous and those that critically influence how access to valued resources, prestige and power is structured at local as well as supralocal levels. The latter are grounded in enduring yet intensely contested social inequalities.
Differences do not necessarily assume the form of unequal social and inter-group relations. However, when they do, they exhibit quite a range of forms. There are the ephemeral, interpersonal rankings and hierarchies that anthropologists have observed in relatively egalitarian societies and in the egalitarian contexts and modalities embedded in stratified social formations. The forms of social inequality to which growing numbers of anthropologists are increasingly directing their attention are constituted within structured, institutionalized domains with moorings in broad relations of power and political economy. The scope of those relations is often global.
In the contemporary world, the symbolic and material dimensions of inequality and power are being actively renegotiated in dynamic contexts of crisscrossing flows and overlapping fields in which civil societies, states, markets and capitals are being restructured according to the logic of a transnational, neoliberal culture. Accompanying, or perhaps as a result of this process, disparities of wealth, health, life-expectancy and military control appear to be widening.
If these trends continue to unfold, what are the implications for subsistence security, intercultural relations, human rights and well-being, and the prospects for environmental sustainability and world peace? What identities and practices are emerging to contest, craft alternatives to, and arrest these trends? What ideologies, social movements and political projects are being mobilized to create conditions for a future of greater equality and social justice?
Analyzing Justice in Society
The link that some assume to exist between justice and equality is informed by only one among a number of competing ethical principles for judging what is right and wrong. How are such principles negotiated, and in what ways do they relate to cultural precepts, socioeconomic positions and (geo)political interests? To what extent are models and struggles for justice gendered, raced and grounded in culturally resonant expressions of class consciousness and opposition to heterosexism?
Given that language is such an important dimension of identity, what role do language ideologies and politics play in contests over the meanings of and possibilities for equality and justice? How does talk about difference implicate forms of symbolic and structural violence? Or does it reinforce regimes of truth that claim kinship, classlessness, color blindness, gender neutrality, and equal opportunity in the face of hunger, poverty, pandemics, homophobic hate crimes, mass rape, war and genocide?
Linking Past and Present
These questions speak to the constraints and potentialities of the contemporary sociocultural terrain. Through the lens of a holistic social science, they are also inextricably linked to questions about the past that biological anthropologists and archaeologists can answer. How have human differences and social inequalities formed over the course of time? What is the relationship that inequalities have had to social and economic complexity, state formation and expansion, and patterns of environmental exploitation? What does the archaeological record tell us about the agents of history? How are their subjectivities and modes of action inscribed on the landscapes archaeologists unbury?
Archaeologists and biological anthropologists do not only focus on the past. Their puzzle solving also applies to present-day situations. Studies of urban garbage dumps and of contemporary health disparities across lines of gender, racial, class and national status are only two cases in point.
Embracing Dialogue
The discipline stands only to benefit from a dialogue critically and reflexively informed by efforts to rethink and generate new perspectives on difference, social inequality and social justice, as interlocking concerns. We can meet this challenge by: 1) revisiting intellectual histories that have influenced the way we ask and answer questions; 2) critically assessing the ideological assumptions of established theories and seeking alternatives; 3) exploring potential sites of intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization for new insights; 4) examining ethical dilemmas and responsibilities; 5) bringing Western and non-Western, academic and nonacademic epistemologies into genuine conversation; and 6) linking anthropological pursuits to public engagement. These are some of the issues that should stimulate our reflections on this year’s theme.
CONTACT:
Communications about the program theme should be addressed to Executive Program Chair Faye V Harrison at the University of Florida, Department of Anthropology, Turlington Hall, PO Box 117305, Gainesville, FL 32611-7305; dcmeeting@gmail.com; 352/392-1020. Please refer all other annual meeting questions to the AAA Meetings Department at 703/528-1902 ext 3009 or ext 3005; aaameetings@aaanet.org.