EASA 2018: Staying, Moving, Settling

Long abstract

The global crisis of post-war geopolitical-economic arrangements has put the interconnection of capitalist and social processes back on the agenda of anthropological research. The panel focuses on movement and stability within the present reorganizations of the global currents and counter-currents of capital and social reproduction. It revisits the analytical capacity of concepts like capital and class, and of long-term “total” perspectives, referring back to the long tradition of a global systemic anthropology (Wolf, Friedman) that includes Marxist social history, dependentista, world-systems and Subalternist approaches. This perspective interprets contemporary social relations as part of a larger historical process fueled by capital accumulation and its integrative, yet conflictual relation to social and ecological reproduction, as a dialectical process engendering stability and mobilization alike.

We invite papers that address new articulations of mobility and stability in the context of the present global crisis and reorganization of capital. The panel searches for empirically grounded, yet theoretically and politically enabling insights that address current transformations of “systemic” and “antisystemic” tendencies in the emerging articulations of what seems to be an increasingly intense conflict between social and ecological reproduction, and the reproduction of capital globally. Topics may address various aspects of current reorganizations and conflicts in the “interdependent process of social metabolism” (Marx) – such as labor, infrastructural and reproductive relations, center-periphery aspects of global reorganization, settler colonialism and accumulation by dispossession, or relations between state formation, the agrarian question, and capitalist restructuring.

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