Conferences
The Department of Anthropology hosts occasional major conferences and symposia that seek to advance scholarly conversation, collaboration and research supported by the Department's faculty and students.
Upcoming conferences and symposium:
Hindu Transnationalism: Organizations, Ideologies, Networks
November 19, 2009 - November 22, 2009
10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Fondren Library
Co-sponsored with the Humanities Research Center
Recent departmental conferences and symposium:
“At the Juncture of Ethnography and Social Theory”
the Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston TX, April 24-25th, 2009
Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Rice University and the Center for Ethnography, University of California-Irvine
Conference Description:
The dialogue between ethnography and social theory has long been a fertile area in the human sciences, one that has helped give shape to entire fields like social-cultural anthropology and cultural and historical sociology. But the dialogue has often been accompanied by tension and fallen short of true collaboration. Social theory and its practitioners have too often tended to treat ethnography as the provider of raw forms of data for theory’s “higher” analytical labors. And, ethnographers have reciprocally often accused theory of metaphysical estrangement from the goals and methods of ethnographic engagement and they have called for more delicate and reflexive analytic methods and mechanisms.
Our premise in this event is that the juncture between ethnography and social theory is an extremely generative analytical space one that deserves more sustained and innovative collaborative enterprises to tap its full potential. We highlight, for example, how ethnography produces social theoretical problems and settlements of its own, settlements that can then be transposed as “portable analytics” into the conceptual apparatuses of other research and design contexts. We note the presence and significance of embedded modes of theorization within ethnographic analysis but we also explore how ethnography helps to refine social theoretical attention to the processual and material dimensions of human experience. And, finally, we discuss how greater historicization and contextualization of the making and circulation of theoretical knowledge – parallel to the attention paid to the contexts and genres of ethnographic knowledge in the 1980s -- can help to reframe our practices of teaching and mentoring students in the arts of social theory. We find that dissolving the artificial divide between theorem and datum, and undermining the transcontextual fantasies of theory and the realist fantasies of ethnography are essential to opening the juncture between ethnography and social theory to new modes of analytical attention and practice.
In short, our conversation explores how a more intensive and focused critical collaboration between the analytic methods of ethnography and social theory could help to reshape the future of both fields and of the disciplines (like anthropology) that rely upon them.
Conference Poster and Abstracts: