CALL FOR PAPERS

SALSA Fifth Sesquiannual Conference
June 17–21, 2008
Oxford and Paris

To reflect the international character of our growing society, our next sesquiannual meeting will be in Europe (we hope to have a future meeting in South America). The main conference will take place in Oxford, followed by a special event in Paris.

NOTE: As of February 1st, we are no longer accepting abstracts for spoken papers.
However, WE ARE ACCEPTING ABSTRACTS FOR POSTER PAPERS
until April 1st. For information on submitting a poster paper, please contact
Istvan Praet at the following e-mail address: istvan.praet@linacre.ox.ac.uk

Please also note that this is not the page for conference registration or for booking lodging
at the conference. For registration and booking information, please click HERE

To ensure that the maximum number of papers may be accommodated within the three-day programme, while securing discussion time after each paper (a long and cherished tradition), we have decided to structure the Oxford conference around five broad themes: Indigenous societies of the Guiana shield; People’s visual and material worlds; Symbolic ecology, plant knowledge and rights; Market and non-market exchanges; Encounters between communities and the indigenous rights advocacy movement.

There will also be a general Amazonian anthropology panel for papers which do not fit neatly within any of the five broad themes mentioned above. Finally, and to follow a well-established tradition, a distinguished guest speaker, Joanna Overing, will address us after the conference dinner.

Indigenous societies of the Guiana shield
Oxford University has played a historically prominent role in the development of Amazonian anthropology. This is well represented in the classic works of Audrey Butt-Colson and Peter Rivière, as well as in the large Arawakan and Cariban artefact collections of the Pitt-Rivers Museum. In honor of the notable contributions made by these Oxford scholars to the ethnography and ethnology of lowland South America, this panel will explore themes in the anthropology of Guianese societies, principally membership and society. In so doing, this panel will provide a meta-commentary to ongoing debates in the field regarding the relationship of ethnography to ethnology and the self to the collective.

Organizer/chair: Janet Chernela

Amazonian people’s visual and material worlds
If the centrality of the body in Amazonian cultures is no longer to be demonstrated, the ways in which artefacts are mobilised in the making of persons and social groups are still largely unexplored. Given what we know of their distinctive values, the Kayapo’s infatuation with videos and other modern image-making techniques, or the Tukano’s passion for writing down their clanic tradition in books are not surprising to us. But many aspects of the relationship between humans and artefacts (babies and hammocks, shamans and their rattles, hunters and their weapons, or women and their pots) have yet to be explored. Similarly, the nature of the visual and the interplay between visible and invisible domains of Amerindian lifeworlds – in everyday as in ritual contexts – may be usefully explored.

Organizer/Chair: Elizabeth Ewart

Symbolic ecology, plant knowledge, market and property rights
If the treatment of animals has received wide coverage in Amazonian anthropology, such is not the case for the plant world. Yet, studies of cultivation practices, plant knowledge and plant symbolism indicate an extraordinary wealth and diversity of plant/ human interactions in Amazonia. Moreover, plants play a key role in the economic and cultural survival of many indigenous economies in the region. This panel will examine the complex links between thought and practice as their relate to plant symbolic ecology, inter-cultural exchanges of plant knowledge, and conflicts arising from diverging understandings of the nature of plant knowledge, as well as of its ownership.

Organizer/Chair: Marc Lenaerts

Market and non-market exchanges in Amazonia
The co-existence of long-distance and intra-community exchange has a long history in Amazonia and surrounding regions. Market exchange from the very beginning has been grounded in complex motivations and collective projects embedded in inter-group relations and village dynamics. Indigenous peoples’ attempt to acquire industrial goods has been analyzed through a number of different lenses, from political economy to perspectivism. The panel considers the consequences of participation in a market on Amazonian societies and cultures both contemporaneously and/ or historically. Papers that discuss the way anthropological analyses of indigenous symbolic and practical economies interact with the claims for resources, rights and services being put forward by indigenous people themselves are especially encouraged.

Orgnizer/Chair: William Fisher

Indigenous Peoples, the Private Sector, NGOs and the State
This panel is meant to open a space for measured reflections and dialogue on the hotly-debated issue of interactions between indigenous peoples, state agencies, human rights and conservation NGOs, and the private sector. It is aimed especially at NGO activists who design, and academic anthropologists who conduct research on, human development, human rights, poverty alleviation, and ethnodevelopment projects for indigenous peoples in lowland South America. We specifically invite papers on such topics (but not limited to):
• Clashes between state sovereignty and the sovereignty of indigenous peoples
• Debates over eminent domain, the public interest and the private sector, or indigenous self-determination
• The manipulation of indigenous communities, and conflicts over indigenous representation, in the context of negotiations with the private sector
• Corporate social responsibility and voluntary self-regulation or corporate accountability and State regulation
• Debates over indigenous development priorities
• Clashes between indigenous regimes of value and those of the money economy
• Dilemmas for NGOs supporting indigenous self-determination
• Political space, indigenous representation and the dangers of substitution by NGOs
• Cases studies on conflicts between, or the successful coordination of, Indigenous rights and conservationists' priorities
• NGO accountability and NGO constituencies

Organizers/Chairs: Steven Rubenstein and Marcus Colchester

Amazonian anthropology panel
We hope that the five themes suggested for the 5th meeting are sufficiently broad and varied. However, there will be a general session for members who wish to submit papers on topics not well represented above.

Organizer/Chair: Laura Rival

Special day in Paris

France, which has the largest number of Amazonian anthropologists in Europe, has recently rehoused its ethnographic collections (masterpieces of the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas) at the Louvre and at the Musée du Quai Branly. Lévi-Strauss’ recognition of formal similarities between art forms unconnected in time or space is gaining new prominence, and new ideas about the relationship between art and anthropology are being debated.
The idea of a special optional day in Paris builds on a ‘long’ (at least 35 years) tradition of Franco-British meetings. At regular intervals, Amazonian anthropologists from both sides of the channel have come together to share ideas and exchange viewpoints. With the newly created Musée du Quai Branly celebrating its second birthday, and Claude Lévi-Strauss entering his one-hundredth year of life on this earth, the French school of Amazonian anthropology will have much to share with SALSA members in 2008. Philippe Erikson will organise this special day around themes and issues that are at the heart of today’s French Amazonian anthropology.

Organizer/Chair: Philippe Erikson