SPA Biennial Meeting 2005

“Anxious Borders: Traversing Anthropological Divides

Held in partnership with the American Ethnological Society

Catamaran Hotel, San Diego, CA
April 7-10, 2005

The joint meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Ethnological Society aims to bring together the best of current research and theory in our fields. All methods and topics concerning culture, society, body/mind, and person are welcomed, and we invite researchers from SPA and AES to submit their current work.

We are especially interested in submissions that bridge and question current, received topics, practices, concepts, relational categories, and dichotomies (such as public/private, social/intimate, or linguistic/embodied) that create divisions in and between our anthropological subfields. We are interested in identifying the political, cultural, and disciplinary circumstances that keep subfields divided, and prevent scholars from traversing these divisions. Considering the bridging of subfields, what are some of the best examples in current work that integrates sociocultural and psychological anthropology?

When we hold a mirror up to our subdisciplines what connections with the world are we missing? Which experiences are we ignoring? What interrelated topics go with too little reflection? What comes back to haunt us? We invite colleagues to submit proposals for panels, papers, posters, videos, and other formats addressing this rubric including, but not limited to, such topics as: the political economy of belonging; the psychology of inequality; the emotional politics of gender and ethnic identities; the personal/psychological dimensions of modernity; the globalization of emotional and experiential forms; the experience of class; the politics and policing of visibility and intimacy; the making of child soldiers and youthful killers; the marketing of fear; the generation of consumer desire; the cultural politics of trauma and healing; the psychology and political economy of speech acts, translations and new literacies.