28149: Bellegarde-Smith (announce) Caribbean Movements: Linking People, Objects, Places (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: P D Bellegarde-Smith <pbs@csd.uwm.edu>


Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 13:36:20 -0500
From: Flemming Daugaard <anthrofd@ufl.edu>

Dear All,

We are in the process of putting together a panel for the upcoming AAA
(American Anthropological Association) Annual Meeting in November in San
Jose, CA, based on the preliminary abstract listed below this message.

If you are interested in participating in this panel, entitled "Caribbean
Movements: Linking People, Objects, Places", please send us a paper
abstract, not exceeding 250 words, as soon as possible and by March 29th at
the latest.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in presenting a paper in this
panel, please forward this email to them. We are particularly interested in
anthropologists who have recently done research in the Caribbean or among
people from the Caribbean on issues related to this proposed panel. Ph.D.
candidates as well as more established academics are encouraged to get in
touch with us and submit an abstract.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to get in touch with
us if you have any questions regarding this panel proposal.  To communicate
further, please send an email to:

anthrofd@ufl.edu

I will forward emails to Erin, my co-organizer.

Best,
Flemming Daugaard-Hansen, University of Florida, anthrofd@ufl.edu
Erin Taylor, University of Sydney, erin.taylor@student.usyd.edu.au


Panel Abstract:

Caribbean Movements: Linking People, Objects, Places.

This session addresses how people in specific Caribbean localities engage
certain objects to communicate identity and belonging in contexts that are
transnational or translocal in character. These intersections of people,
objects, and places, as fluid movements rather than clearly bounded and
grounded, point to other critical intersections in anthropological debates
on migration, transnationalism, material culture and consumption, and
theories of space and place.

Migration has long been a hallmark of Caribbeanist anthropology, and the
transnational approach to understanding the effects of globalization and
migration has emerged in the Caribbean context, where it has proved
especially valuable in understanding how people from the region often
traverse established social, cultural and political boundaries while
maintaining translocal social fields of relations. Yet, in these
transnational social fields, where the political, economic, cultural and
social boundaries between the Caribbean and the rest of the world often
become blurred, specific tropes, representations, and ideas of the
Caribbean, the West, and other specific national or local essentialized
differences exist, and have concrete implications for people whose status
and presence in local contexts is contested or ambiguous.

The session seeks to incorporate papers that are based on recent research in
the Caribbean, or among people from the Caribbean, with a particular focus
on people who are either migrants, part of transnational social networks, or
otherwise engaged in transnational practices that tie them to both the
Caribbean and other parts of the world.

By looking at how people in these transnational Caribbean social fields
engage specific objects, whose meaning at the local level is often contested
and multivalent, as ways of negotiating identity and belonging, this session
seeks to further the understanding of the implications of globalization and
transnationalism in complex local contexts. At the same time, the papers in
this session illuminate the social construction of meaning of objects in
contexts where such meaning is contested, renegotiated and used to
communicate identity and belonging by often disparate groups of people.