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In Part 1 of this panel, we explore the health impacts of ongoing, repeating, and intersecting disasters in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We highlight the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars to consider how the intersections of our social, racial, and ethnic identities create different forms of access to truth(s) and require heightened levels of social and community responsibility in our ethnographic research. We focus on the intersecting realities of disaster events with our embodied experiences as we expand beyond prevailing anthropological discourses of vulnerability and resiliency to consider what is the responsibility of anthropologists in documenting and addressing health crises in our ongoing fieldwork. We, also, address how COVID-19 has inspired us to create new forms and methods of anthropological research and engage in discourses that consider the health implications of fieldwork in the midst of global crises. Here we address: the ongoing water crises in Newark, NJ and the mental health impacts of COVID-19 on community activists; exposure to air pollutants/asbestos and increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in Chicago, IL; possibilities for ethnographic fieldwork while coping with COVID-19 and a high active hurricane season in New Orleans, LA; P’urhepecha indigenous ontologies and community responses to COVID-19; and the possibilities for empathic ethnography in the midst of COVID-19. We build on anthropological discourses of disasters as man-made processes (Douglas &amp; Wildavsky 1982; Janes &amp; Chuluundorj 2015; Hinkson 2017; Das 2007; Bonilla 2018) to uncover how disasters are not singular short term ‘events’ but ongoing restructuring of lived worlds (Paredes 2006; Jackson 2006) that have grave impact on the quality of life, care work, and health of project participants and field researchers.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Five Named Storms and a Pandemic: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of the 2020 Hurricane Season in Louisiana

environmental justice

disaster

health

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

In Part 1 of this panel, we explore the health impacts of ongoing, repeating, and intersecting disasters in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We highlight the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars to consider how the intersections of our social, racial, and ethnic identities create different forms of access to truth(s) and require heightened levels of social and community responsibility in our ethnographic research. We focus on the intersecting realities of disaster events with our embodied experiences as we expand beyond prevailing anthropological discourses of vulnerability and resiliency to consider what is the responsibility of anthropologists in documenting and addressing health crises in our ongoing fieldwork. We, also, address how COVID-19 has inspired us to create new forms and methods of anthropological research and engage in discourses that consider the health implications of fieldwork in the midst of global crises. Here we address: the ongoing water crises in Newark, NJ and the mental health impacts of COVID-19 on community activists; exposure to air pollutants/asbestos and increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in Chicago, IL; possibilities for ethnographic fieldwork while coping with COVID-19 and a high active hurricane season in New Orleans, LA; P’urhepecha indigenous ontologies and community responses to COVID-19; and the possibilities for empathic ethnography in the midst of COVID-19. We build on anthropological discourses of disasters as man-made processes (Douglas & Wildavsky 1982; Janes & Chuluundorj 2015; Hinkson 2017; Das 2007; Bonilla 2018) to uncover how disasters are not singular short term ‘events’ but ongoing restructuring of lived worlds (Paredes 2006; Jackson 2006) that have grave impact on the quality of life, care work, and health of project participants and field researchers.

technical paper

P'amenchinkua COVID-19: Protecting Indigenous Life in the Midst of Colonial Disease

Wade in the Water: Mental Health Impacts of the Newark Water Crises & COVID-19 on Black & Latinx Artivists

As applied disciplines dealing with some of the most marginalized people in our society, forensic anthropologists have the potential to shed light on important and persistent social issues that we face today. Over the last several decades, forensic anthropologists have successfully perused research agendas primarily focused on the development of individual biological profiles (e.g., sex, age, ancestry), time since death, recovery, and identification. Few forensic anthropologists, however, have taken a step back from their lab bench to write about how and why people become forensic cases or place their work in a larger theoretical context. Thus, this session challenges forensic anthropologists to consider how we can use our toolkit and databases to address larger social issues and quandaries that we face in a world where some are spared from becoming forensic anthropology cases and others are not. As witnesses to violence, crimes against humanity, and the embodied consequences of structural violence, we have the opportunity•and arguably, the responsibility•to transcend the traditional medico-legal confines of our small sub-discipline, by synthesizing forensic anthropology casework into theoretically grounded social science with potentially transformative potential. As ethical researchers, we must embrace our responsibility to reveal these truths, even if they go against the grain of mainstream forensic anthropology research. As anthropologists, we must go beyond case-specific description and analysis to understand what our work reveals about humanity. Anecdotally, many forensic anthropologists probably have noticed certain demographic trends and speculated about the larger meaning, but statistics are hard to come by. For example, Indigenous, black, and brown bodies find their way into forensic anthropology casework in North America at disproportionally higher rates compared to white bodies. However, they are also far less likely to participate in body donation programs that contribute to the development of forensic anthropology methods used to determine biological profile and which make it harder to positively identify a non-white people using forensic anthropology methods. Thus, the colonial specters of racism and socio-economic inequality not only increased the mortality rate of marginalized groups•hastening their lives•they continue to haunt them in death. How might forensic anthropologists advocate for the often anonymous people who become forensic anthropology cases? Moreover, women of color as well as transgender individuals contribute to forensic anthropology casework and missing persons databanks in North America at higher rates than these demographics exist in the general population. Can increased awareness of this reality bring attention to the crises of femicide and transgender-directed violence? Can we move past binary sex determinations to recognize the embodied experience of people with trans and non-binary gender identities? Verification of anecdotal observations with statistical evidence as well as osteobiographies will be an important step forward for forensic anthropologists becoming more than just expert technicians and witnesses, but advocates for the marginalized, persecuted, and voiceless.

Towards the Margins: Accounting for the Marginalized in Forensic Anthropology

Forgotten Spaces: The Structural Disappearance of Migrants in South Texas

Homelessness, Mental Illness, and Race: Forensic Anthropology Case Files as an Archive of Marginalization in Honolulu, Hawai'i

The role of Forensic Anthropology to document the osteology of poverty in Detroit, Michigan in the 21st Century

Theorizing Social Marginalization for Forensic Anthropology: Insights from Medical Anthropology and Social Epidemiology

Fifteen years after Sharon Kaufman and Lynn Morgan’s influential annual review article on the anthropology of the beginnings and endings of life, anthropological studies of life and death have moved to the center of medical anthropological inquiry. Beginnings and endings are good to think with, posing questions about personhood, belonging, sociality, value, and the role of technology in remaking life forms. Recent anthropological scholarship has shown how ethnographic accounts of life’s beginnings and endings can elucidate broader processes of social reproduction, rupture, and change. Most studies, however, center on either of these two poles rather than considering them in tandem. Taking Kaufman and Morgan’s (2005) review as a point of departure, this panel considers the analytic possibilities afforded by thinking about beginnings and endings together, from a critical, comparative lens. Contributions engage ethnographic material from both ends of life’s spectrum to show how simultaneously attending to these poles can enrich understandings of life and death. Biopolitics offers one possible framework for bringing these foci into conversation with one another, yet it is not the only one (cf. Han and Das 2016). We invite consideration of how biology and technology organize social life in many cultural settings, as well as theoretical approaches that trouble the increasing reliance on biologized notions of life and death. How do life’s beginnings and endings serve as flashpoints for cultural tensions between traditional and modernity? How do religious and political entities like the Church and the state regulate threshold forms of personhood in different settings? How can insights from anthropologies of grief and bereavement help us when death comes at the beginning of life? How do fieldwork experiences of death and reproductive events•among researchers and participants•infuse our theorizing on life and death? Potential ethnographic foci include, but are not limited to, abortion, assisted dying, palliative care, technologies of reproduction and life-prolongation, childbirth and maternal death, funeral and mortuary rituals, organ transplant, and brain death. By looking at beginnings and endings of life in tandem, we seek to shed light on some of the most important global conversations unfolding at the intersection of medicine, law, and bioethics today.

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Five Named Storms and a Pandemic: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of the 2020 Hurricane Season in Louisiana

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P'amenchinkua COVID-19: Protecting Indigenous Life in the Midst of Colonial Disease

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