Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Anthropology and Environment Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Anthropocene

Secondary Theme: Materiality

(2-0390) Matter Beyond Bounds: Caring for Objects that Resist Jurisdiction (Part 2)

What happens when people care for objects that resist jurisdiction and intention? This panel explores the effects of care on slippery objects and processes, things that cannot be easily bounded or governed.

Anthropologists writing about affect and climate change have recently begun theorizing what it means to care for large environmental and industrial processes whose material effects may be far removed from the person who cares (Howe 2017; Callison 2016; Van Dooren 2014). In this construction, the process of "care" is not necessarily positive, and it might also be boundary-making - deciding the shape of a glacier, the nature/culture divide, or one’s standing before the law. How is such care expressed, and what effects does it have on its object?

This panel interrogates processes care and jurisdiction as they intersect with natural-cultural phenomena. We invite papers that explore how these processes unfold through forms of stewardship and authority that are expressed from different locations and subject-positions. How do distributed processes become objects of jurisdictional authority? How does felt proximity to environmental change reconfigure social relations and aspirations, and produce newly-articulated objects of care? In this panel, we examine the objects of such care: water, air, landscape, and toxins. What happens when materials like these resist or exceed the jurisdictions that exist to regulate them (cf. Choy & Zee, 2016; Cooper, 2018; Povinelli, 2016; Simpson, 2014)? What are the effects of this excess?

Works cited:

Callison, Candis. 2014. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Choy, Timothy, and Jerry Zee. 2015. "Condition-Suspension." Cultural Anthropology 30 (2):210-223.

Cooper, Jessica. "Unruly Affects: Attempts at Control and All That Escapes from an American Mental Health Court." Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 85–108.

Howe, Cymene. "Timely." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 21, 2016. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/800-timely


Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Van Dooren. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Organizer(s)

• Sonia Grant

  University of Chicago

Chair(s)

• Sonia Grant

  University of Chicago

Organizer(s)

• Hannah Burnett

  Ph.D. Candidate
  University of Chicago

Presenter(s)

• Hannah Burnett

  Ph.D. Candidate
  University of Chicago

• Talia Gordon

  University of Chicago

• William Voinot-Baron

  Doctoral Candidate, Anthropology
  University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Gebhard Keny

  Rice University, Department of Anthropology

Discussant(s)

• Elaine Gan

  New York University

Presentations:

• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  Caring Near and Far: Making the Shape of South Louisiana
  Hannah Burnett – University of Chicago
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  Lead is a Heavy Metal: Temporalities of Crisis and Repair Following Toxic Contamination in Flint, Michigan
  Talia Gordon – University of Chicago
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  “I Fish When the Elders Say to Fish”: Fisheries Management and the Temporal Politics of Care for Chinook Salmon in Southwest Alaska
  William Voinot-Baron – University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  Cuts in the Mud: Intertidal Mudflat Conservation in South Korea
  Gebhard Keny – Rice University, Department of Anthropology
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  Discussion
  Elaine Gan – New York University