About the anthropology conference
Dec. 8th, 2010 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogSo, about the conference I went to in New Orleans.
It was the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association. I don't have a good sense of how many attendees there were, but the 2007 figure was about 5600. We took up the event space of two hotels, and there were many, many papers being presented, as well as poster sessions (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
danaeris told me what those are), a graduate school fair, and other things.
I decided to attend after meeting an anthropologist friend ofsynicism's. We were introduced because I'm interested in going to school for that degree, and he told me that, before he started school for his own degree in anthropology, he attended the national conference and that it changed his life. It had really cemented his ideas about what he wanted to do as far as a career and life-path.
Since I'd already been talking about wanting to visit New Orleans this year with my new little car, I decided I'd go along with the prodding in that direction I seemed to be getting. And that was even before I met Danae and found out that she'd be at another conference in the same place at the same time!
So, I paged through the program online a few times and felt a little bit overwhelmed. Would this be over my head? Would I be able to understand what people were saying or would it be full of jargon? Which papers did I want to attend the presentations of? There were so many events; from noon to ten solid on the first day!
I went to a bunch of things over the course of the conference, notepad or laptop in hand to make notes about what I was seeing. There were a bunch of things that weren't of particular interest to me on the program, but just as many things that I would have liked to see if there wasn't something even better happening at the same time. Among my favorite presentations were:
*Papers on a development in Brooklyn called Atlantic Yards and how it engaged and affected the inhabitants of the area.
*A paper on the rubble heaps left in Berlin post WWII and the the way the diversity of the plant and animal population of those sites has affected the planning of urban wilderness spaces and the study of urban flora and fauna worldwide.
*A paper on the way that a community of Assyrian diaspora who have worked their way to wealth distinguish themselves by means of architecture in a traditionally architecturally uniform Swedish town, and what the other residents of the town think of that.
*A paper on community empowerment facilitied by urban farming initiaitives (and the related concept of 'food deserts'; areas in urban spaces where there are no available places to buy decent food. I heard more about that concept on NPR a week or so ago, and it's honestly infuriating. No one who understands that there's nowhere in some inner city areas for families to buy good, healthy groceries can still stay that everyone in this country has an equal opportunity to succeed in life. And I digress, but it pisses me off and, like so much else, it needs to be fixed.)
*A paper about a businessman's plan to buy up vast swathes of Detroit, consolidate remaining residents into small areas, and convert the rest of the land to farming.
*Some really interesting papers on social aspects of public transit and public transit stations, and how social boundaries are different there, and how they are (or aren't) enforced by peers.
*A paper (presented by two people, one of them in a baseball cap, scruffy beard, t-shirt, shorts, and sandals) about the Kalamazoo Promise. As interesting as the subject of the paper were his assertions that anthropologists should promote socialist economics and that capitalism is an inherently violent system. He wasn't quite like any of the other presenters I saw, and I am intrigued.
I could go on, but I'll sum up. I learned that what seems to interest me the most is study of how urban areas, and their change and development, engages people as individuals in the present. A couple papers that were purely about urban planning in the abstract were not quite as interesting, nor were papers on archeaological urban development. (Though some of them were, in fact, pretty interesting too. I was surprised and intrigued to learn that the first cities in the Americas built on a grid were laid out that way to meet the demands of the clergy, who wanted the natives all living in the same place so they could be forced to go to church and be converted. The conquistadors themselves, it sounds like, really didn't give a damn where the natives lived.)
I didn't go to much on linguistics, though that's something that intrigues me too. I'm going to take at least one class in that field and see what it's like. But anyway, most of what I ended up seeing were panels presented by a group called the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology. That's a pretty encompassing name there, so I wasn't quite sure what they were about, but it seems that they have a focus on the anthropology of urban areas, so I'm going to check into that group and learn more about them.
I should note that there were a couple things that would have been awesome to go to only because they appealed to personal interests, or just sounded damned funny. Like a paper called "They Came Through the Walls and Stole my Semen: A Virtual Ethnography of an Online UFO Community", or "Language of Play, Language of Power: An Analysis of Discourse in the Kinky Community" (One of these being more the former, and one the latter!).
I talked to a number of presenters after they were done with their papers and got some contact info to follow up with them. And perhaps most importantly, I got a chance to see what these people called anthropologists really spend their time investigating and doing. And it's pretty neat stuff. I didn't have the same kind of life-changing experience that my acquaintance who recommended I attend did, but my time there did leave me pretty solidly convinced that this is something I would very much like to do myself.
I want to learn more about people and the way they live, and help contribute to understanding of those ways of life. This should be the way to do it.
It was the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association. I don't have a good sense of how many attendees there were, but the 2007 figure was about 5600. We took up the event space of two hotels, and there were many, many papers being presented, as well as poster sessions (
danaeris told me what those are), a graduate school fair, and other things.I decided to attend after meeting an anthropologist friend of
synicism's. We were introduced because I'm interested in going to school for that degree, and he told me that, before he started school for his own degree in anthropology, he attended the national conference and that it changed his life. It had really cemented his ideas about what he wanted to do as far as a career and life-path.Since I'd already been talking about wanting to visit New Orleans this year with my new little car, I decided I'd go along with the prodding in that direction I seemed to be getting. And that was even before I met Danae and found out that she'd be at another conference in the same place at the same time!
So, I paged through the program online a few times and felt a little bit overwhelmed. Would this be over my head? Would I be able to understand what people were saying or would it be full of jargon? Which papers did I want to attend the presentations of? There were so many events; from noon to ten solid on the first day!
I went to a bunch of things over the course of the conference, notepad or laptop in hand to make notes about what I was seeing. There were a bunch of things that weren't of particular interest to me on the program, but just as many things that I would have liked to see if there wasn't something even better happening at the same time. Among my favorite presentations were:
*Papers on a development in Brooklyn called Atlantic Yards and how it engaged and affected the inhabitants of the area.
*A paper on the rubble heaps left in Berlin post WWII and the the way the diversity of the plant and animal population of those sites has affected the planning of urban wilderness spaces and the study of urban flora and fauna worldwide.
*A paper on the way that a community of Assyrian diaspora who have worked their way to wealth distinguish themselves by means of architecture in a traditionally architecturally uniform Swedish town, and what the other residents of the town think of that.
*A paper on community empowerment facilitied by urban farming initiaitives (and the related concept of 'food deserts'; areas in urban spaces where there are no available places to buy decent food. I heard more about that concept on NPR a week or so ago, and it's honestly infuriating. No one who understands that there's nowhere in some inner city areas for families to buy good, healthy groceries can still stay that everyone in this country has an equal opportunity to succeed in life. And I digress, but it pisses me off and, like so much else, it needs to be fixed.)
*A paper about a businessman's plan to buy up vast swathes of Detroit, consolidate remaining residents into small areas, and convert the rest of the land to farming.
*Some really interesting papers on social aspects of public transit and public transit stations, and how social boundaries are different there, and how they are (or aren't) enforced by peers.
*A paper (presented by two people, one of them in a baseball cap, scruffy beard, t-shirt, shorts, and sandals) about the Kalamazoo Promise. As interesting as the subject of the paper were his assertions that anthropologists should promote socialist economics and that capitalism is an inherently violent system. He wasn't quite like any of the other presenters I saw, and I am intrigued.
I could go on, but I'll sum up. I learned that what seems to interest me the most is study of how urban areas, and their change and development, engages people as individuals in the present. A couple papers that were purely about urban planning in the abstract were not quite as interesting, nor were papers on archeaological urban development. (Though some of them were, in fact, pretty interesting too. I was surprised and intrigued to learn that the first cities in the Americas built on a grid were laid out that way to meet the demands of the clergy, who wanted the natives all living in the same place so they could be forced to go to church and be converted. The conquistadors themselves, it sounds like, really didn't give a damn where the natives lived.)
I didn't go to much on linguistics, though that's something that intrigues me too. I'm going to take at least one class in that field and see what it's like. But anyway, most of what I ended up seeing were panels presented by a group called the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology. That's a pretty encompassing name there, so I wasn't quite sure what they were about, but it seems that they have a focus on the anthropology of urban areas, so I'm going to check into that group and learn more about them.
I should note that there were a couple things that would have been awesome to go to only because they appealed to personal interests, or just sounded damned funny. Like a paper called "They Came Through the Walls and Stole my Semen: A Virtual Ethnography of an Online UFO Community", or "Language of Play, Language of Power: An Analysis of Discourse in the Kinky Community" (One of these being more the former, and one the latter!).
I talked to a number of presenters after they were done with their papers and got some contact info to follow up with them. And perhaps most importantly, I got a chance to see what these people called anthropologists really spend their time investigating and doing. And it's pretty neat stuff. I didn't have the same kind of life-changing experience that my acquaintance who recommended I attend did, but my time there did leave me pretty solidly convinced that this is something I would very much like to do myself.
I want to learn more about people and the way they live, and help contribute to understanding of those ways of life. This should be the way to do it.
