Intellectual Play in San Francisco

2012 AAA Annual Meeting Program Chair Report

111th AAA Annual Meeting

Hilton San Francisco

San Francisco, California

November 14-18, 2012

Registrants: 6,650

Papers Submitted: 5,622

Sessions Scheduled: 775

Special Events: 232

Poster Sessions: 19

Exhibitors: 60

Career Center Recruiters: 21

Throughout our November meeting in San Francisco, people came up to me and said that it had been, if not the best, one of the best AAA meetings they had attended. “And I’ve been to a lot,” proclaimed a senior scholar. But as a social scientist, I am conflicted. On the one hand, I know these comments represent anecdotal evidence that the meeting was a success. On the other hand, as the executive program chair, I want to believe that some of our deliberate choices to encourage conversation, from Salons to room placements, worked.

The Hilton San Francisco lobby during the 2012 annual meeting. Photo courtesy American Anthropological Association

The theme for the 2012 AAA meeting, Borders and Crossings, was created in consultation with President Leith Mullings along with the twelve members of the Executive Program Committee. The goal was to find a theme that would generate panel abstracts that either directly or indirectly addressed the fallout from the science controversy. The caricature of the discipline that emerged in Internet conversations and published responses made it clear that many anthropologists remain unfamiliar with our discipline’s foundational literatures, variety of methodological approaches to knowledge production, and range of engagements from policy to scientific research. The theme was designed to use the meeting as an opportunity to repair some of the fissures by celebrating our discipline’s diversity and strengths.

At the same time that the goal was to celebrate methodological diversity within our four fields, the meeting was also supposed to be a time to reflect on the fact that our discipline cannot and should not try to be all things. While it is important to cross disciplinary borders, we also wanted some of the panels at the 2012 meeting to discuss problems with watering down our mission to understand human behavior in all its complexity for the purposes of appealing to dominant institutional interests. As stated in my November 2011 Anthropology News article (AN 52[8]: 47), “We want to acknowledge the structures, genealogies and technological changes that continue to shape our research questions, methodological choices, and subsequent interventions in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology and sociocultural anthropology. With respect to disciplinary exclusions and inclusions, the institutional and discursive constraints that shape what we can and cannot do are ours to own and ours to overcome.”

The challenge was enthusiastically received, and the 2012 meeting broke numerous records. There were 6,650 registrations, 775 scheduled sessions, and 212 special events. Given the increasing size of the meeting, I recognized that we needed to create more spaces of intimacy. President Mullings has met this challenge by creating the AAA Annual Meeting Task Force. In the coming year, check Anthropology News for information about structural changes to the meetings that are meant to maintain the momentum started in 2012. While I realize the compliments I received in the halls of the Hilton were anecdotal, I also believe that the structural changes we made mattered. What really struck me as program chair was not just the energy in the Hilton that was almost palpable, but also how strong our discipline is. The scholars in our field are breaking new ground and articulating ways to make anthropology relevant for the 21st century.

Carolyn Rouse was the Executive Program Chair for the 2012 AAA Annual Meeting.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/07/intellectual-play-in-san-francisco/