[Bilimsel Haber] Self-Cultivation

[Sule Tarakci]

AAA panel on Self-Cultivation


CAll FOR PAPERS FOR A PANEL FOR:

The 106th AAA Annual Meeting
Washington, DC
Nov. 28- Dec 2

Please address any inquiries or send paper abstracts no longer than 250
words in length to Lilith Mahmud (lmahmud at fas.harvard.edu) and Katrina
Moore (klmoore at fas.harvard.edu) by March 18, 2007.
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PANEL TITLE:
"Transforming Subjectivity: Self-Cultivation and Embodied Training as
Path to Social Change."

The rise of self-cultivation practices and discourses in recent years
has shed light on the pervasiveness of individualistic modes of
self-care and self-help, co-produced with the advent of modernity. In
post-industrial, cosmopolitan societies in particular, self-making
techniques are becoming increasingly prominent, often recasting in
purely individualistic terms transformations that are also political and
socio-economic in scope. In such contexts, questions of social justice,
such as gender inequality, religious intolerance, or conflict in labor
relations, are often experienced as issues of personal rather than
societal transformations, displacing the burden of change from
institutions to individuals.

Self-cultivation has been studied primarily as the domain of expert
intervention by state institutions or religious organizations. Many
studies of self-care, following Foucault, have interpreted therapeutic
interventions and disciplinary processes, as oppressive tools of
conformity and social control. Recent years, however, have witnessed the
emergence of self-cultivation processes that extend beyond the exclusive
reach of direct institutional intervention, becoming instead a matter of
individual initiative. While even these seemingly non-coercive practices
of self transformation may reaffirm normative social values and
conformity, they nevertheless carry remarkable subversive potential for
reshaping oppressive social structures, and call for a reappraisal of
how scholars analyze and interpret self-cultivation strategies. This
panel will thus explore the ambiguous potential for social
transformation inherent in processes of self-cultivation, whereby
subjects are the putative agents of their own self transformations.

Drawing from a variety of ethnographic cases in Japan, Italy, Indonesia,
and…?, the papers in this panel will explore voluntary self-cultivation
movements that take as their explicit premise the belief that social
change may only be attained through a path of self-transformation.
Paying attention to specifically situated individual subjects who may
ascribe to or resist various regimes of self cultivation, this panel
will examine theoretically and methodologically the embodied training
that render self-cultivation practices possible within particular
anthropological locales. Blurring the distinction between personhood and
society, this panel will further interrogate forms of self-cultivation,
as simultaneously repressive and empowering techniques, with profound
implications for wider questions of social justice.
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Please address any inquiries or send paper abstracts no longer than 250
words in length to Lilith Mahmud (lmahmud at fas.harvard.edu) and Katrina
Moore (klmoore at fas.harvard.edu) by March 18, 2007.


Lilith Mahmud (lmahmud at fas.harvard.edu)
Katrina Moore (klmoore at fas.harvard.edu)
Harvard University
Department of Anthropology
Email: lmahmud at fas.harvard.edu