AFA's Live Annual Review 2017

 AFA’s Live Annual Review 2017 Association for Feminist Anthropology Lucinda Ramberg, Joanna Davidson, Carla Jones, Bianca Williams, and Rayna Rapp June 25, 2018 Old favorites, new classics At the AAA Annual Meeting last November, the Association for Feminist Anthropology hosted its rst ever “Live Annual Review,” a roundtable re ecting on feminist anthropology as a sub eld. Bringing scholars together from a range of career stages, the roundtable sought, as the abstract stated, to “engage in collaborative re ections regarding the next cutting-edge insights and critical arenas that inspire and transform our scholarship.” As participants debated the meaning of feminist anthropology, one central theme that emerged was the on-going challenge of citational erasure. Participants discussed the challenges of non-reciprocal citational networks in which feminist anthropologists cite mainstream anthropology, but not the other way around. Some discussed the challenge of making feminist anthropology’s insights central to anthropological training, rather than treating the eld as a discrete topic, tackled during a syllabus’s “gender week.” Others pointed to the problem of citational erasure being recursive: the canon of feminist anthropology itself erases the contributions of key gures. Throughout, participants discussed favorite classics in the eld and new discoveries. Building on the momentum of the panel, we invited participants to send us a brief discussion of an old favorite and new classic in feminist anthropology. The result is a vibrant range of not only ethnographic monographs but also articles, anthologies, and Twitter hashtags. Together, these serve as a sign not only of the vibrancy of feminist anthropology, but the growing possibilities for expanding practices of citation, practices that include hyperlinked blog posts like this one. You can watch a video of the full roundtable here at the AFA’s website. Lucinda Ramberg Since Sherry Ortner posed the question “Are Women as to Nature as Men are to Culture?”, feminist anthropologists have been working with and against the proverbial natureculture divide and its implications for how social relations, biological processes, reproductive technologies, enactments and inhabitations of gender, and cultures of power and knowledge might be thought. In Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil, Emilia Sanabria calls for a shift away from ambivalence over medically assisted practices of bodily transformation towards “matters of care” which, drawing on Donna Haraway, she situates as a way of embracing the impure nature of the composite and leaky bodily being in which hormones make worlds through us and we with them. Joanna Davidson Andrew Bank’s Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists introduces us to the lives and work of six (mostly forgotten) women anthropologists who shaped the emerging eld of anthropology in Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, and whose legacies extend far into both British and American schools of anthropological thought and method. Bank’s intellectual history prods us to reconsider the roots of feminist anthropology, and to rethink the anthropological canon more broadly. Carla Jones Annette Weiner’s truly classic text, Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange is justi ably adored. In it, she managed to radically transform anthropologists’ understanding of a place we thought we knew, the Trobriand Islands, through revealing the gendered structure of symbolic and material exchange. By putting women’s activities at the center of the analytical frame, Weiner conveys the full symbolic economy on which Trobriand Island values rest, a world that makes no sense without women. Similarly, Ann Marie Leshkowich conveys a place that is both iconic in American political history and still widely misunderstood in Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace. By following female traders at the largest public market in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Leshkowich nds that even as the Vietnamese state has downplayed private enterprise as capitalist, and the people who practice it as grasping, it has relied on those same women to sustain families and forms of tradition. Although set in very di erent contexts, remote versus urban, both Weiner and Leshkowich do what the best feminist ethnographies do: connect women’s navigation of particular political, economic and symbolic worlds to the theoretical approaches that might not have otherwise noticed them. Bianca Williams Irma McClaurin’s Black Feminist Anthropology and Faye V. Harrison’s Decolonizing Anthropology o ered critiques and re-imaginings of our discipline, which gave birth to a new generation of erce Black women and feminist anthropologists. Across sub elds, some anthropologists have put into practice the gifts o ered in those texts—many of them highlighted in Christen Smith’s #CiteBlackWomen and A. Lynn Bolles’ article on citation practices and the erasure of Black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology. Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven carry this important work forward in their text Feminist Activist Ethnography, while Maya J. Berry et al call for a “fugitive anthropology.” Rayna Rapp Feminist anthropologists and sociologists continue to produce rich accounts in their ongoing investigations of the centrality of reproduction to theory and practice. Sarah Franklin’s punny and challenging Biological Relatives provides a rich engagement with the history of feminist activism as the furnace in which many of our concepts were forged. Sharmilla Rudrappa’s Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India o ers a cogent and thoughtful analysis of what she dubs “markets in life.” Recent articles by Kim Tallbear, Dána-Ain Davis, Natali Valdez illuminate the intersection of race and reproduction as central to our anthropological future. Roundtable participants included Carla Freeman, Inderpal Grewal, Lucinda Ramberg, Rayna Rapp, and Bianca Williams, with Joanna Davidson and Carla Jones serving as co-chairs. Cite as: Ramberg, Lucinda, Joanna Davidson, Carla Jones, Bianca Williams, and Rayna Rapp. 2018. “AFA’s Live Annual Review 2017.” Anthropology News website, June 25, 2018. DOI: 10.1111/AN.851 Related Categories Related Tags  20 Commenting Disclaimer   © 2018 American Anthropological Association • 2300 Clarendon Blvd, Suite 1301 • Arlington, VA • 22201 • TEL (703) 528-1902 • FAX (703) 528-3546