CALL FOR PAPERS: AAA Panel on 'The State: Fixity and Circulation'

As a follow-up on an earlier post, there's a Call for Papers for a Panel on 'The State: Fixity and Circulation'. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting to be held in wonderful New Orleans, Louisiana from 17-21 November 2010.

Note that the deadline is 21 March 2010.

The H-Net listing reads:

Please address any inquiries or send paper abstracts no longer than 250 words in length to Christine Folch (cfolch@gmail.com) and Jeremy Rayner (jcrayner@gmail.com) by March 21, 2010.

Statehood is almost synonymous with boundary-making, whether it’s the territorial borders of the nation-state, or the institutional boundaries that have made a “state”-“civil society” distinction part of our common sense. At the same time, these processes of boundary-making occur in the context of a capitalist modernity to which circulation has a particular centrality. This panel will bring together ethnographically- and historically-grounded papers that consider to what degree, and under what circumstances, states are constituted and represented as spatiotemporally-fixed, coherently-bounded entities with respect to the circulation of values, persons, and signifiers through space and over time. How has the making of modern nation-states and empires defined limits and shifted boundaries to incorporate or exclude practices, institutions, signifiers, groups of people, resources, and territories? How have particular instances of boundary-making (or unmaking) interpenetrated with collective projects located, wholly or partly, outside of state institutions? How might these interpenetrations, together with the historical contingency of state boundary-making, cause us to rethink analytical categories such as “the state” and “civil society”? The panel will address these questions by bringing together ethnographically and historically-grounded papers that examine particular instances in which the spatiotemporal fixity of the state is brought into question by processes of circulation.