CFP: AAA 2018
American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, November 14-18, 2018
San Jose, California
Organizers:
Natalia Gutkowski (Harvard University) and Ashawari Chaudhuri (MIT)
Time and Power in Agrarian Environments
Time has emerged as a locus of critical theoretical inquiry in anthropology over the past three decades. Nancy Munn’s influential essay “The Cultural Anthropology of Time” published in 1992 not only circumscribed the production of time as opposed to time as an already established constant, but also opened the floodgates of thinking about time and temporality as seats of power. This panel explores the imbrications and juxtapositions of time in/with agrarian environments. While producing and managing agrarian environments have often been tied with control of spatial and human resources (land, water, labor), in the era of growing social-environmental precarity, agrarian environments are becoming a matter of temporal control as well. Recent scholarship reflects on the time of uncertainty, anticipation and preparedness that are bound with agro-environmental politics and power in cases such as GMOs, climate modeling, time techniques in land grabs or the state of finitude of resources and species extinction. Horizons of future are, however, one way of formulating relations between time, agriculture, and the environment. Papers can be about the following: How time is read and told among communities of practice, tools of time-reckoning and what remains and what gets submerged in these tellings, seasonality and the constant techno-scientific attempt to push its limits, and rhythm of the market and the state in understanding the past and future of agriculture and environment.
Finally, the panel will explore the multiple uses of time as a technique of power and social control in agrarian environments. We ask, how can we better understand political processes and power relations in the agrarian environments when time is added to our analysis? How does it change a social dynamic when we understand the different temporal imaginaries that various actors hold? What, if anything, can be learned anew about agrarian environments through a focus on their temporalities?
Please send abstracts (250 words max) to both Natalia Gutkowski (ngutkowski@fas.harvard.edu) and Ashawari Chaudhuri (ashawari@mit.edu) by the end of the day on Tuesday, April 3. Please include your name, affiliation, title of paper, and email.
We will notify authors by Sunday, April 8. Session participants must be registered AAA members and registered for the meeting by April 16.
Dr. Natalia Gutkowski, PhD | Environmental Anthropology
Academy scholar| Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies| Harvard University
FoodAnthropology 