Dear all,

There are still have some slots available. If you're interested in
contributing, please send me your abstracts until April 10: rgcoelho (at)
binghamton.edu

Best regards,
Rui Gomes Coelho

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*The distress of things: materiality, agency & ethics*
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*Call for papers*

*112th American Anthropological Association annual meeting*

*Chicago, IL, November 20-24 2013*

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*Organizer: *Rui Gomes Coelho, Binghamton University (
[log in to unmask])

*Discussant: *Ruth Van Dyke, Binghamton University

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Anthropologists, archaeologists and other social scientists have been
discussing issues of materiality and agency for at least two decades. In
fact, it has been a long time since the Cartesian dichotomies of
human-object and culture-nature were challenged. More recently, some
scholars have been preferring to look at material agency by assuming human
intentionality as the edge of the discussion. Alfred Gell’s *Art and
Agency*(1998) became a central piece in those contributions, offering
the concept
of “extended mind” to understand how objects are created and manipulated as
conveyors of ideas. Others, however, defend more radical positions in terms
of materials’ autonomy. For instance, Bruno Latour and his works on
Actor-Network theory (ANT) have been quite influential among
anthropologists. In a broad sense, researchers engaged with ANT appreciate
the idea that the role of human actors in the world might be considered
more equally along with non-humans. In this way, human intentionality is no
longer decisive when it comes to determine who has the determinant role in
a human-object relationship.



These discussions are also raising ethical issues. Following the fall of
Socialism and the triumph of the neo-liberal economic models in most of the
world over the 1990s, social sciences became hostages of the “end of
history”. Thus, the increasing attention on the role of material culture in
society’s lives can be regarded as part of an epistemological post-human
turn, where things tend to be an intellectual escape from the political
correctness of the hegemonic economic and social model. Social scientists
start to fantasize about the dynamics of an apparently inert, material
world as an alternative to the turmoil of engaging with their own
societies. However, things themselves proved to be as inconvenient as
people. We may ask ourselves how far the idea of an autonomous material
world is leading us, and we should consider the ethical consequences that
such approaches may carry to contemporary social problems that emerged out
of late capitalism: social inequality, economic exploitation, political
surveillance.



With this session we intend to bring people back to the discussion of
materiality and agency with a set of papers that explore different
historical and anthropological contexts.