Message posted on 23/03/2023

AAA cfp: Pilgrimage and Community: Spaces in Transition

This invite from Augusta Thomson (NYU) may be of interest to those planning to attend the AAA meeting in Toronto. Please contact Augusta for any further details.

Pilgrimage and Community: Spaces in Transition

Since its origins at the heart of anthropological fieldwork, the notion of community has been theorized and theorized away from. Scholars have pointed to the trouble of community (Amit and Rapport 2002) and sought to de-center it (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986, Latour 1987). And yet, beyond the space of the academy, community is used again and again to describe commitments to beings both human and nonhuman. While community has often been developed both ethnographically and theoretically as a relatively stable social formation, this panel re-opens the idea of community as a term and process in transition. It incorporates the lens of pilgrimage, and specifically, the theory of communitas to reconsider the liveness of communities as spaces of transition where social cohesion and fragmentation occur and recur in ways that engender new modes of being with. In so doing, it considers not only the liminal productivity of the notion of community, but the liminal space of communities in transition. Particular attention will be given to multimodal and collaborative modes of knowledge-making that think into and through the idea of community, as well as to papers that address the theme of pilgrimage.

Thank you so much for considering this, and I hope we can all work together in some capacity in the future.

Warmly, Augusta

Augusta X. Thomson (email address: axt203@nyu.edu) (she/her/hers) PhD Candidate, NYU Anthropology

www.augustaxthomson.com


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