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- Convenors:
-
Claire Beaudevin
(CNRS, Cermes3)
Katharina Schramm (University of Bayreuth)
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- Chair:
-
Kristine Krause
(University of Amsterdam)
- Discussant:
-
Janina Kehr
(University of Vienna)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D320
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The making of categories and differences is central in our fields of inquiry (race, ethnicity, health, medicine). How to account for it and for the resulting inequalities while avoiding reification? How to deal with these elephants in the rooms of our fieldwork, academic writing and public outreach?
Long Abstract:
The making of categories and the crafting of difference(s) are central practices in medicine, bureaucracy and broader political fields. These classifications produce inclusions as well as exclusions that have profound impacts on people's lives. However, the relationship between classificatory practices and their tangible social, political and material impacts is not always explicitly framed by social actors, nor is it systematically explored by anthropologists.
With this roundtable, we seek to address this tension by focusing on the question how to account for the exclusionary politics of difference without reifying it? How to account for these elephants in the rooms of our fieldwork, our conceptualizations, our academic writing, our public outreach?
We aim to discuss issues such as the classification of people into migrants, asylum seekers or expatriates; the usage and consequences of racialized categories in biomedical research; explorations of the genome in search of 'evidence' of ethnicity and ancestry; the definition of eligibility for citizenship or treatment; or the application of scales of perilousness to both viruses and people.
As members of two of EASA's networks (ARE and MedAnthNet), we would like to share epistemological, methodological and ethical insights and troubles raised by these distinction processes and their consequences in our respective fields.
For this roundtable, we welcome proposals for short and sharp provocations (10 minutes each), which will launch a broader discussion among the panelists as well as with the audience.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Discursive classifications have consequences for enacted practice. Drawing on fieldwork alongside Roma health mediators in Romania, I ask: how might anti-essentialism gain traction in environments that privilege a reified and dichotomous understanding of ethnicity?
Paper long abstract:
Interventions that try to improve the health of marginalised population groups such as migrants or ethnic minorities, often use binary classification in order to determine eligibility. In doing so, they simultaneously produce inclusion (e.g. by improving access to health care) and exclusion (e.g. by perpetuating the category of a group "in need"). Interventions may employ classifications strategically to access funds from state institutions who subscribe to a rhetoric of "underserved and irresponsible" communities. This discourse can fuel prejudice and racism.
Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork alongside health mediators working with Roma communities in Romania, I show how discursive classifications have consequences for enacted practice. By focussing on citizenship, hygiene, vaccination and reproductive health, mediators inadvertently promote a harmful image of Roma as reckless, unhygienic, virulent and highly fertile.
For anthropologists, observing, writing, and reaching out in anti-essentialist ways can be seen as a form of care towards people we observe and write about. However, this form of care does not necessarily take into account the ways in which it is sometimes necessary for social actors to reify difference. My provocation is that anthropology's ability to account for the relationship between material context, discursive and enacted practices of classification has insufficient traction outside academic contexts. I invite a discussion about how these insights might be translated in ways that are relevant and locally meaningful to social actors working in environments constrained by bureaucratic and financial entanglements that privilege a reified and dichotomous understanding of ethnicity.
Paper short abstract:
Medical Anthropology has long been concerned with the effects of classificatory systems on social actors. However, my data-driven provocation is that this can ignore the ways different classificatory systems get enacted and put to work, compounding or contradicting one another.
Paper long abstract:
Medical Anthropology has long been concerned with the effects of structural classificatory systems on social actors, but in doing so can ignore the ways that different classificatory systems get enacted and put to work, compounding or contradicting one another. Our discipline has, for example, informed a strong "cultural critique" of the psychiatric system of categorising mental health problems, which ignores culturally contingent forms of mental distress. It has advocated for alternative models and spaces in which cultural difference and diversity can be better acknowledged. However, embarking on ethnographic fieldwork in one such space, a psychotherapy centre designed specifically for Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic and Refugee (BAMER) communities, raised a different set of anthropological concerns: does this catch-all category of ethnic or cultural 'other' to assess eligibility for care simply supplant one problematic system of categorisation with another? Both the first concern (against psychiatric categories) and the second (against ethnic othering) are valid and seek to divert damaging 'real world effects.' But they leave us with an impasse: the effects of one set of fixed categories pitted against another. My fieldwork revealed that the BAMER category was often enacted and put to work in order to deliberately disrupt the diagnostic model. In this particular setting, the loose category of minority status was shaped by the function that social actors wanted it to perform. My data-driven provocation is that we must look at situated real world enactments of categories within our investigations of their effects.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses differently positioned men targeted by Kenya's HIV prevention apparatus. It examines the ways adolescent boys, men who have sex with men, and expecting fathers are "made up" with little attention to the elephant in the HIV prevention room: class differences.
Paper long abstract:
This provocation will entice the audience to think critically about (re)categorization and imaginaries of risk in the context of global health interventions in Africa. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out primarily in Kenya on HIV prevention, I focus on the ways that differently positioned men have come to be targeted by Kenya's HIV prevention apparatus. Building on Ian Hacking's work, I examine the ways that adolescent boys, men who have sex with men, and expecting fathers are "made up" in specific ways with little attention to the elephant in the HIV prevention room: class differences. By focusing on gender and sexuality, HIV interventions routinely overlook the extent to which class shapes HIV risk, thereby reinforcing outdated assumptions that HIV is a disease driven by poverty in Africa. There is growing evidence, epidemiological and otherwise, that middle-class African men are among those least likely to be reached by global health interventions of any kind—specifically HIV interventions. What is behind our failure to take class seriously in HIV prevention? What might be gained by recognizing and engaging with this particular elephant from the perspective of public health, but also anthropology? What happens to social theories of gender inequality, agency and risk if we reconfigure middle-class men as "at risk"?
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines caste social movements and the difficulties their work to obtain dignity through changed position in hierarchy pose for anthropological representation of caste and social hierarchy. It wonders about the anthropological politics representing hierarchical typological systems.
Paper long abstract:
In a village in Rajasthan, India shifting politics of dignity and naming practice have resulted in a radical change in caste identity in the last 30 years. Leaving no family untouched, this politics has shifted once low caste and indigenous families toward the upper caste Hindu main stream while preventing access to state resources and having long term health effects by limiting access to medical care and food rations. It poses enormous problems of representation and anthropological questions about how to represent a secreted historical social identity and its contemporary effects. How do we write of social hierarchies without reproducing their aesthetic and evaluative hierarchies? How do we maintain the important social and experienced dignity won by these politics while recognising that they have occurred? This paper examines histories of caste in contemporary India to identify pitfalls and propose tentative solutions.
Paper short abstract:
Many anthropologists use ancestry estimation with positive outcomes, although they know about all troubles with the concept. How can one deal with this logical contradiction, both in research as well as in one's own work?
Paper long abstract:
Many practitioners of forensic anthropology work with ancestry categories such as European, African, Asian, or Austro-Melanesian. They understand this classification as biogeographical, not as racial. Nevertheless, the history of these categories is rooted in 19th century racial science and the defining cranial markers and characteristics have changed very little since. However, ancestry estimation is often used with positive outcomes, namely in the identification of unidentified bodies - not as the final or unquestionable result, but as a starting point to help browse missing person's databases, which later becomes confirmed or rejected by DNA testing. During fieldwork among anthropologists, one of the most frequent questions I was confronted with was: "I know race is a social construct, ancestry is a very complicated category, but sometimes it works, and do I not have the responsibility to help with identification if I can in those instances?" In a provenance research project on a collection of skulls set aside for repatriation, we had to deal with similar questions: Should we use techniques of ancestry estimation to make sure individuals had actually come from New Zealand - despite all the troubles with the concept? In my paper I would like to discuss these questions with colleagues and share experiences from other, but maybe relatable areas. How can one research this troublesome field? Is it possible to write about it in a way that is fair to all people involved, following all ethical considerations, showing "the elephant"?