Function and Form

This chapter refers to the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective (ETC), which has staged projects in North American cities exploring intersections between art and anthropology. It analyzes the work that has been manifested in the organization and curation of exhibits alongside the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and inspired by emergent interdisciplinary art practices. It also illustrates projects that have been “para-sites,” which are used to draw anthropologists from the conference venue into arts and cultural spaces in local host cities. The chapter examines a curatorial mode that builds upon critique and argues for the potential of a more experimental anthropology that activates creative practice. It looks at the core of the experimental curatorial model that engaged with multiple modes of collaboration.

Introduction

The articles for this special section of Museum Worlds first started to gain their present form as presentations in the panel “Voices Out of The Dark: Contemporary Museum-Like Practices and Culturalized Politics” during the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in San José, California. Those were very different times from the ones in which this introduction is being rewritten. Now, in late July of 2020, the world has been living for several months with the full consequences of a major globalized public health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has disrupted and changed people’s lives in almost every aspect of their daily routines and actions. Also now, in late July of 2020, we have been living through times of increased calls for change: the Black Lives Matter movement has gained momentum and a global reach after the unlawful killing by a police officer of George Floyd this past May in the city of Minneapolis.

CONFERENCE REPORT: ANTHROPOLOGY OF TOURISM INTEREST GROUP (ATIG) PANEL AT THE 117th ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION (2018)

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A Conversation with the Karrabing Film Collective

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation with members of the Karrabing Film Collective – Lorraine Lane, Linda Yarrowin, Cecilia Lewis, Sandra Yarrowin, and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli – interviewed by anthropologists Melinda Hinkson and David Boarder Giles. The Karrabing Film Collective are a community of Indigenous Australians and their whitefella collaborators who make films that analyse and represent their contemporary lives and also keep their country alive by acting on it. This conversation appeared first as Episode Eighteen of Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin, a podcast about ‘life, the universe, and anthropology’ based at Deakin University and produced by Giles and Timothy Neale, with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, and in association with the American Anthropological Association.

Guest Editorial

The papers in this special issue and the one preceding it have their roots in a panel titled “Ethnography, Misrepresentations of Islam, and Advocacy,” which Timothy Daniels and I organized for the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. We were joined on this panel by Alisa Perkins, Katrina Thompson, Robert Hefner, and Yamil Avivi, where we all grappled with our struggles with the increasingly political nature of our work on Islam. Although we work in a variety of geographic regions, with diverse subjects, we all shared similar concerns regarding the complexity of accurately depicting the Muslim communities we study while challenging the anti-Muslim stereotypes that exist in popular culture and contemporary news media. At the same time, we did not wish to reify popular divisions between “good” and “bad” Muslims or inaccurately depict the lives of our research subjects in order to cater to that popular division. To download full editorial, click on PDF.

Guest Editorial

The papers in this special issue and the one preceding it have their roots in a panel titled “Ethnography, Misrepresentations of Islam, and Advocacy,” which Timothy Daniels and I organized for the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. We were joined on this panel by Alisa Perkins, Katrina Thompson, Robert Hefner, and Yamil Avivi, where we all grappled with our struggles with the increasingly political nature of our work on Islam. Although we work in a variety of geographic regions, with diverse subjects, we all shared similar concerns regarding the complexity of accurately depicting the Muslim communities we study while challenging the anti-Muslim stereotypes that exist in popular culture and contemporary news media. At the same time, we did not wish to reify popular divisions between “good” and “bad” Muslims or inaccurately depict the lives of our research subjects in order to cater to that popular division. To download full editorial, click on PDF.

Introduction

This volume of Religion and Society is a special one. First, with this edition we celebrate our 10th anniversary. While our personnel have changed to some degree, our remit has remained largely the same. We present theoretically and methodologically challenging studies of religion through a variety of formats that place religion at the center of analysis and enable those who study religious phenomena to engage in debate and dialogue with each other. In recent years, our approach has also cemented ties with the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a subsection of the American Anthropological Association. Over the entirety of the last decade, we have continued to publish exceptional interdisciplinary scholarship in social and cultural analyses of religion.