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Session for the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology [proposed]

“Difference, (In)equality and Justice: Locating Personhood and Place in the Commodity Landscape”

2007 - Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association

Session Organizer/Chair: Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D., Research Fellow

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life

The conference theme inspires a session that considers how ideas/things that may be fundamental to construction of personhood and place, can be treated in economic, legal, or political terms, to become either commodified or, conversely, made inalienable. This session will explore the impact of invasive market forces on intertwined processes of person and place-making. Studies of physical displacement, which must address adjustment and change, have encouraged dynamic models of person-place bonds. The work of members in this session expands the concept of displacement. We go beyond what has been a nearly exclusive focus in the literature on involuntary disruption, resettlement, or loss of attachment, to include the alienation, uprootedness or sense of “dispossession” that seem to characterize contemporary life.

Understandings of identity based on a dynamic model of personhood in place recognize that self-identity and personhood constitute complex, ongoing, and negotiated processes within an environment that is both ideological and material, social and physical. This view addresses an important dialectic of change and constancy as well as the tension between a present, actual self and future, possible self. Here we should think broadly about the realization of human potential, sources of restriction on this realization, and ultimately address the question of “flourishing” or necessary conditions for the construction of undamaged personhood and experience of well-being.

Papers on both US and Latin American research will consider how the social, cultural and physical resources available for the projects of person and place-making are shifting within sweeping change brought by post-industrial economic restructuring, increasingly translocal market forces, and the advance of neoliberal ideals. We examine critical but vulnerable resources for person, self, and place-making through consideration of people in diverse situations who live and work at various socioeconomic levels and locations within the “flexible,” global economy of late-capitalism. We explore how this shifting landscape is shaped by politics of social and environmental justice and geographies of difference.

In a variety of ways, our work details how the production, circulation, and consumption of particular economic and legal hegemonies can affect the individual and social potential of human beings. We recognize that the terms in which human life is conceived matter to that life. What does it mean to experience oneself as commodity or "ignored cost?" If a discourse of fungibility becomes part of one’s own account of self, it threatens disorientation of self and distortion of personhood.

We will consider varied reactions to invasive market forces in the process of defining self through labor in a workplace increasingly reliant on commoditized notions of workers where individuals are required to think of themselves as disembedded skills or qualities offered in the marketplace rather than as complete and integral persons. We will also illustrate attempts to preserve elements of “local character,” expressions of place, as essential resources for self and personhood. Our common goal is to point to new ways of dealing conceptually and practically with the mutually implicating impact of profound structural and cultural changes felt by people and absorbed by places where they live, work, and search for meaning in a world where human actions are increasingly characterized as marketplace exchanges.

Session for the Society of Medical Anthropology

The theme of “Critical Intersections/Dangerous Issues” resonates with widespread sentiment that we stand together at a kind of crossroads. Liminal spaces in many societies, crossroads are recognized as sites of power, opportunity and danger. Positioned where anthropology, geography and the sciences of human health come together, this session identifies and discusses important design, planning and lifestyle trends as responses to opportunities and challenges at a crossroads.

Through application of expanding theoretical and practical literature on place, papers on this panel examine intentional environments where a therapeutic ideal is at work. Social scientists studying place have been inspired by cultural critiques of neo-Marxism and postmodernism as well as humanistic approaches of cultural geography. With the deconstruction of place as a given backdrop or container for social and cultural processes, place is now generally interpreted as continuously constructed and contested space. Place is linked to global relations in world marked by “deterritorialization,” the loss of culturally meaningful landscapes and defeat of place-based conceptions of culture to globalization as a social, cultural and economic force. Yet despite declarations of the world’s “placelessness,” the individual and collective experience of place continues to be important. In the face of widespread dislocation, sense of place – the meaning that places have for people and that they give to places – still matters in everyday lives.

This panel encourages conversation between divergent fields, innovatively applying the literature of place to examine and understand its role in human health and well-being. Starting with the concept of therapeutic landscape, we combine a range of practice-oriented and humanistic interpretations. Seen as a symbolic transformation of the natural world and form of cultural production, landscape is a holistic concept that takes account of humans and their anthropogenic environment and how this environment is conceptualized, experienced and symbolized in different locations and times. A geographic metaphor intended to aid social scientists in understanding place-based healing processes, therapeutic landscape is meant to encompass those places that combine the physical, psychological and social environments associated with treatment or healing. This panel extends consideration to a variety of environments from informal shrines and memorials in the deserts of Nevada, the New Urbanist renovation of an historical asylum, to a Zen community, urban zoos, and an innovative hospital.

From landscapes to built forms, our conceptualization of “therapeutic” relates not only to planned treatment of individual disease/disorder or provision of something thought health-promoting but also the impulse or intent to offer remedies for the perceived ills of a collective through alternative social and spatial arrangements. We also appreciate the objectives of individuals for their own relationship with place which may be at odds with the therapeutic plans and intentions of others. The combined projects of this session look at the intent of certain configurations of landscape forms and the design of constructed environments for therapeutic purposes in different contexts. With an eye to the enduring importance of place to human physical and mental health, research presented here will consider different aspects of its therapeutic use.

"Families that we live with, Families that we live by: Current U.S. Research on Middle-class Working Families"

Although there is a long history of examinations of family life in America by cultural anthropologists, we have relatively few examples of direct ethnographic engagement in everyday life with the troubles, contradictions and quandaries that confront those who claim the moral center of U.S. society, i.e., the middle-class. Building on previous work in this important area, this session presents current fieldwork on the American middle-class at a time of economic dislocation, reduced social mobility and turmoil over the very nature and definition of both work and family.

In the landmark, Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor (1989) describes how contemporary notions of the person have grown out of earlier models transformed by the changing practices within which individuals must engage as they negotiate often conflicting obligations and expectations of work and family life. Ethnographic studies by scholars including Katherine Newman (1988;1993), Barbara Ehrenreich (1989), Kathryn Dudley (1994), and Arlie Hochschild (1997) have helped us understand the means by which a rift, or “structural lag” (Moen 2001) between middle-class expectations preserved in the prevailing notion of an American dream that promises upward mobility in exchange for hard work, on the one hand, and the present economic reality and uncertainties of restructuring and deindustrialization on the other, provides the dynamic tension required to precipitate social and cultural change in the form of new meanings and roles for work, family and community in shaping personal identity. Scholars such as cultural historian John Gillis (1996) point to how, in this broad context of change, the family takes on unprecedented cultural significance. In this context, the family becomes pivotal in mediating tensions and contradictions that are basic to a political and economic system "based on values of competitions, instant gratifications and amoral calculations about persons as well as things” (1996:xvi). While the myths, rituals and icons of the families of America past were provided by religion and community, today they are largely self-generated. Individuals in America today not only live with families, they depend on them to do the symbolic work that was once the dominion of religious and communal institutions. In this way, working families represent themselves to themselves as they would like to think they are.

Through presentation of current work in the ethnography of everyday life, this session explores contemporary pressures, forces and conditions that shape the lives of working families in the United States while considering how these alter the subjects of our inquiry and categories that might be taken for granted. Although the papers collected here represent diverse topics, our common thread is the tension we observe between the family that people live by, an imagined family constituted through myth and ritual, set apart as an image of the good, and the family they live with caught in the push and pull of everyday struggles of individuals in pursuit of a livelihood. From the suburbs, exurbs and landfills of Michigan to the mines of Montana, this session pulls together current ethnographic research on middle-class working families in the Heartland of America.

Dudley, Kathryn M. 1994. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1989. Fear of falling: the inner life of the middle class. New York: Pantheon.

Gillis, John R. 1996. A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values. New York: Basic books.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1997. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Newman, Katherine S. 1988. Falling From Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: The Free Press.

----- 1993. Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream. New York: Basic Books.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.