CFP Intervention -- AAA 2019 annual meeting
James Phillips
Foreign Intervention as an Anthropological Problem:
Change, Struggle, Collaboration, Justice
This session invites exploration of the ethnography of intervention, the problem of applied anthropology in relation to intervention, and the subjective and ethical issues raised for anthropologists by changing situations of intervention. Understood as a complex of many different and related mindsets and practices intended either to cause or to stifle radical change in another society or culture, intervention has long concerned anthropology. Often narrowly identified with military invasion of one country by another, the reality of intervention is much broader and more layered, and can include economic, cultural, and social forces. Colonialism can be understood in terms of multiple interventions by which imperial states have sought (and still seek?) to change (post?)colonial societies to serve imperial interests while controlling local popular resistance in the colony and at home. Colonial enterprises are ventures to which anthropologists have sometimes lent their services, just as other anthropologists have developed critiques of colonialism and sought ways to support colonial subjects in resistance. As ideologies and economic models of development began to replace a discredited colonialism, anthropologists have worked in international development projects for governmental agencies or NGOs, often facing ethical questions about who really benefits from such projects and at what cost. Intervention almost always involves struggles of control and resistance, and ethical conflicts. Intervention today always relies on forms of collaboration with dissidents, opposition movements, disgruntled military, or other regional governments (“coalitions of the willing”), as well as provoking collaboration among varied groups in an often problematic attempt at unity in resistance. Intervention is par excellence a question of justice, both at the level of international law and treaty and at the level of people’s everyday lives. This session invites papers that address all aspects of anthropological work in situations on international/foreign intervention. What are some of the ethnographic accounts of the ways in which people are prepared to accept intervention, or the consequences to their lives of intervention? Given the long and active history of U.S. interventions in Latin America, especially, how does a “culture of intervention” in the United States affect or shape the daily lives and major issues and conflicts (racism, immigration, inequality, incarceration) of U.S. society itself? What cultural work does the adjective “imperial” in relation to U.S. interventions do, and why is it often shunned? How does intervention adapt its forms to changing local and international political and cultural climates? How do people organize and resist interventions of different kinds? How are mass and popular media and language used to promote a sense of legitimacy for intervention? What is the proper attitude and role of anthropology as a discipline toward the complex reality and adaptability of interventions as they affect human populations?
450 words
Esther Kingston-Mann
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2019 6:11 PM
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Subject: CFP Intervention -- AAA 2019 annual meeting
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