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@fas.harvard.edu) and Katrina Moore (klmoore@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@fas.harvard.edu) and Katrina Moore (klmoore@fas.harvard.edu) by March 18, 2007.