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TRANSLOCALITY
DISCUSSING CULTURE AND CHANGE IN THE 21st CENTURY
MAY 3-8, 2005 Merida, Mexico
Our increasingly complex world cannot be understood today as a collection of self-contained localities. Anthropology has been quick to respond to the challenges posed by the new forms of hybridity and intensified exchange between localities, nations and world regions. One of the implications of the new approaches is that our perspective itself has changed the way we perceive culture, borders, power and change. The relationships between localities and supralocal or global institutions continue to change according to fluctuations in larger socioeconomic cultural and political processes. It is possible to argue that localities may open or close themselves to the world, according to changes in their larger, socioeconomic and cultural environment. In the meantime, the new movements for aboriginal rights and other social movements are staking their claims on strong notions of place and locality, which are often conflated with identity and cultural belonging. Furthermore, the idiom of the nation is gaining new strength as it is redefined outside its prior identification with the boundaries of States.
The Canadian Anthropological Society / Societe Canadienne d’Anthropologie (CASCA), the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA), an the Facultad de Ciencias Antropológicas de la Universidad Autonoma de Yucatán (UADY) have joined to hold together their 2005 Conference in the city of Merida, Yucatan, in Mexico. This tri-national and tri-lingual anthropology conference will take place May 3-8, 2005 at the central campus of the Automous University of Yucatan. We invite you to explore with us the issues of locality, translocality, nationality and transnationality in what promises to be an exciting transnational gathering, bringing together anthropologists from around the world.
We invite anthropologists from all areas and regional specializations to submit abstracts in any of the three official languages of the conference on the themes of locality, translocality, nationality and transnationality, as well as other themes relevant in anthropology today. They could include (but are not limited to) issues such as race, class and power; local sites of resistance and their interaction with the state; everyday practices and struggles via translocal processes; gender, race, and social movements; gender and sexuality; indigenous rights; immigrant rights and the role of the state; policing the nation across borders; contemporary forms and practices of xenophobia, racism, and state terror; bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, new patterns of accumulation; locales, boundaries, borders, unions and allegiances; political edges and zones of confrontation; sites of contestation; moments of innovation; places on the margin or on the cusp; tensions and conflicts in our research sites; our roles as researchers and public intellectuals; research ethics; the ways in which marginal places, people and agendas may become central, and the reverse; and our praxis from social, regional and national locations as anthropologists trying to intercede in debates about pressing issues in troubling times.
Organizers: Gabriela Vargas-Cetina (UADY) Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz (UADY) and Franciso Fernández-Repetto (UADY)
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