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ANTHROPOLOGY CONFERENCE CONCEPT NOTE (Draft)
Conference theme: Vernacular Modernity/ Alternative Development Pathways/ Development from Below
Dates and Venue: July 2020 VASS, Ha Noi, Vietnam
Co-hosts: VASS and USSH
Contacts: Nguyen Thi Thanh Binh (VASS), Nguyen Van Suu (USSH), Philip Taylor (USSH)
Deadline for submission of expressions of interest: 23 November 2019 (one week from now).
PURPOSE
Raise the profile of the discipline of anthropology in Vietnam and the profile of Vietnamese anthropology abroad.
Identify, consolidate and cultivate themes of existing and potential strength among Vietnamese anthropologists.
Collaborate and build working relationships with relevant anthropological specialists in Vietnam’s near region.
These aims to be achieved by:
WHY HAVE A MAIN CONFERENCE THEME?
To identify intellectual commonalities across different topic areas that flow from a shared methodology and common disciplinary principles
To offer the public a coherent, rich and powerful vision of the state of the discipline in Vietnam
WHY THIS THEME?
SOCIETAL/POLICY SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CONFERENCE
International politics has shown how oft-despised and written-off cultural subalterns have the power to change the course of events, even in the most powerful nations and empires. These are people who may have been marginalised by development/globalisation. Often they do not make themselves legible to formal classifications, or embody stereotypical or high-status norms of civility or modernity. Their manner of thinking may be considered mythical, parochial, or non-scientific and their worldview may be dismissed as irrational and simplistic. Their motives, practices and methods frequently are informal, with communications conducted in vernacular idioms or minority languages, and thus these ways of being often are invisible or illegible to formal analysis.
These ways of life are not traditional/primitive/outmoded, or ‘survivals’, since they have shaped and have been shaped by contemporary processes; but neither are they conventionally deemed to be modern for they are invisible to policy makers and are dismissed by intellectuals.
Such people may experience hardship but their way of life is not necessarily unsustainable; they may be endowed with valuable attributes that are conventionally dismissed for they are considered marginal, but they can be extraordinarily powerful. They think and act in unfamiliar ways but their perspective has logic and coherence; they have been written off as losers or obsolete but they are actually the engine that drives societies forward.
They are citizens, albeit subaltern citizens – perhaps deemed the objects rather than the subjects of history - yet they have a voice of their own, walk their own paths, and thereby have changed the world of elites.
Anthropology is a suitable discipline for contributing to the study of vernacular modernity: understanding how people of all stripes make history in diverse ways, often on their own terms.
WHY GROUP PARERS INTO SUB-THEMES?
POTENTIAL THEMES [These are speculative and to be revised in line with proposals received]
Minority Pathways / Networks
Border-crossing subjectivities: transnational lives, inter-ethnic relations, challenging categories
Spiritual Culture, religious modernities
Negotiating traditional norms; emergent social identities
Land and livelihoods
Medical anthropology
Ecological anthropology, belonging, space and place
Tác giả: ussh
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