Anthropology Today

to, the better the odds of coming across simple, interesting, well-constructed papers. Regrettably, I missed Financial Times managing editor Gillian Tett’s talk – a video is available online – which, by all accounts, gave fascinating insights into how her training as an anthropologist allowed her to see beyond the inflated rhetoric of the ‘boom years’ to the disavowed dangers building within thefinancial system. Fortunately, I attended the panel Linking mobility and stasis, which offered papers that tracked the cultural and existential implications of transnational migration and circulation. Several of the papers also raised questions related to how, and if, persons managed to find a sense of mooring in the world in their global movements and physical dislocation. There was not evenstanding room for the panel organized by Jason Throop on ‘moral experience’. I stood outside and heard papers given by Thomas Csordas, Saba Mahmood, Cheryl Mattingly and Robert Desjarlais, which explored different political, experiential, sociocultural and affective dimensions of ‘morality’. As I opened the door on to my fourth panel, I heard a presenter informing his audience that ‘…the city is abecoming…’ I shut the door quickly and hard – for a moment or two I thought about locking it. A panel or two later, a 15-minute paper managed to mention the following names in the opening salvo: Derrida, Agamben, Deleuze, the double-act Hardt and Negri, Zizek, and I think I heard a Badiou somewhere in there. I got up and left. Later, I tried another panel. This panel was perhaps the most brutal,focusing on a country which had suffered decades of war, violence and tremendous hardship. Here, I thought, we would be spared the excesses – the babble. Well, it didn’t take long till we were being asked by one of the discussants to ponder whether we were being ‘Latourian enough’. Millions of people killed, decades of suffering…and the problem was how we could squeeze in more Latour-ese. I can hearthe responses to this now: ‘Latourese is not opposed to…’ That was the final panel I attended willingly. On the last day I was giving a paper, so I had some time to kill until then. I settled down in the bar of the Sheraton Hotel, familiar faces passed, some waved from the distance, and a few even managed to say hello. Several people I knew from previous conferences had disowned me; I would have torenew my acquaintances from scratch if I wanted to renew at all. As is typical of fieldwork, my time at the bar provided no magical insights. The chatter I could hear was banal. Nobody embarrassed themselves, at least not loudly enough for me to hear. Things looked up when I met a George Bush-loving, Republican-supporting anthropologist. He was fun for five minutes after which we bored eachother, made our excuses and left. That same day I chatted to a few conference veterans. ‘Your first mistake was going to a panel’, one of them chirped at me. I now had my informants; they had done all the hard work so I wouldn’t have to. ‘This year’s Triple-A seems different. There’s a strong move towards much more practical and engaged forms of anthropology this year. Jerry Sabloff,
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in thisyear’s Distinguished Lecture, said that our motto shouldn’t be publish or perish, but rather, public or perish…or something like that. That gets lefty, old-timers like me enthused…He got a standing ovation for that, Jerry did.’ Another veteran chimed in, ‘We’ve been hearing about “engaged anthropology” for decades now, but with the financial crisis, with the attack on funding for the humanities andthe social sciences, the Human Terrain stuff, anthropologists are in the firing line for a lot, and many of us are returning to much more classical political-economy problems… more so than I remember for years. You can talk about Marx these days without offending most of your audience and being told you’re meta-narrativizing.’ I gave my paper on Sunday, the very last day. Two gentle souls...