Call for Papers-Call for Applications - Part 71

posted by usha on 2006/07/29 21:18

[ Call for Papers-Call for Applications ]

This is rather late, yet, I'd like you to pay attention to the following Call for Papers and conference to come: Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones is an interdisciplinary conference organized by the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 437: War Experiences – War and Society in Modern Times and by the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen on December 7-9, 2006.

The conference’s aim is to explore the connection between modern war and the anthropological disciplines. The theme is therefore not the anthropology of war itself (as a universal human phenomenon), but rather war as an experiential space and science as social action within that space. The rise of globalized, modern warfare produced intercultural encounters on an unprecedented scale, and anthropologists/ethnologists saw themselves as experts for “foreign culture”. Based on our knowledge of the links between this nascent academic discipline and empire-building, the conference seeks to discuss how this connection was carried over into the situation of world war. Where did scientific practices formed under the conditions of colonialist expansion continue and where did they cease or become modified by war experience?

For this reason, the historical focus of the conference will be on the years leading up to and including the First World War as a critical juncture in the development, specialization, and institutionalization of the anthropological sciences. How does war limit, change, but also support and make possible ethnographic research practices? What kinds of experiences do anthropologists have as participants in the war effort and/or as victims of it? What effect does the war have on the direction anthropology takes as a scholarly discipline, in particular for the increasing specialization and thus drifting apart of its various subfields? Papers which go beyond the focus of the era of the First World War are warmly welcomed, but for the sake of comparability, they should focus on wars and/or violent conflicts in which nation-states are involved.

The conference would particularly like to address the issue of how modern war offered anthropologists and related disciplines specific spaces created by warfare, thereby opening new fields of research. In the material as well as the discursive sense, war creates its own spaces and places, such as prisoner-of-war camps, refugee camps, cities under siege or as battle zones, occupied territories, frontlines, enemy territory. At the same time, certain geographical areas and their indigenous populations were symbolically constructed as war zones or regions of endemic warfare, such as the Balkans or the Caucasus. Papers from any relevant field are invited which address and analyze issues of ethnographic practices involved in creating such war zones and/or scholarly activities undertaken in spaces created by and in wartime.

Proposals may be submitted from any of the applicable fields, i.e. anthropology, history, ethnomusicology, history of science, etc. Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short CV by email, if possible, by July 31, 2006 to:

reinhard.johler@uni-tuebingen.de
Prof. Dr. Reinhard Johler
Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft
Schloss
72074 Tübingen


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