AAA Annual Meeting 2012 - San Francisco, Borders and Crossings

Session proposal: Crossing paths with Johnny Cash: Anthropological musings on the man in black

Organizers: Paul Christensen, Union College
Eric J. Cunningham, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

U.S. born singer/songwriter Johnny Cash remains a profoundly influential, albeit controversial, figure in the lexicon of American popular music. His genre-crossing songs earned critical accolades and commercial success, and remain popular today among a diverse and diffuse fan-base. Through his distinct voice and compellingly understated lyrics, Cash urged audiences to consider the morality of prisons, the consequences of war, the horrors of Native American genocide, the grace of spirituality, and the darkness of humanity. However, Cash’s fame was about more than his music. Conveying an overtly masculine, often unabashedly Christian, persona, Cash presented a sound and image that felt and sounded quintessentially American. He was the man in black, “an embodiment of the American male’s most flattering picture of himself” (McClintock 1978). He was also contradictory, rubbing shoulders with political and religious elite, yet remaining a rebel who pushed the sensitivities of a pre-Woodstock America, struggled with addiction, and helped fuel the rise of rock and roll.

The organizers of this panel are both fans of Johnny Cash who feel there is power, message, and meaning in his songs and life. However, we are also detractors in various senses, recognizing that no man can be a saint without blemish. Still, in the “man in black” we find profundity, humor, insight, and indignation, as well as good rhythm. Thus, our goal is to create an entertaining and intellectually rigorous panel that draws on the life and work of Johnny Cash. Papers in this session will use the music and mystique of Johnny Cash as starting points for anthropological discussions concerning persistent issues of contemporary relevance. Our hope is that specific songs will serve as cues for focused and general conversations on the ongoing importance of anthropology, possibilities from within the discipline for social change, and the role of popular culture in scholarly discourse. Put simply, we feel that songs and artistry matter and thus take time to muse on the man in black, and thereby give notice to meaningful areas of ongoing attention in anthropology. (more…)

Panel on Art and Anthropology
“Painting My Fieldnotes: Rethinking the strange crossings between artists and anthropologists”
Sponsor: Irving C Johnson, National University of Singapore
Please contact Irving Johnson for details at: seajic@nus.edu.sg

Description:
I am looking for anthropologists who would like to be on my panel at the AAA in San Francisco in November 2012. If you are interested, please respond to seajic@nus.edu.sg by 3/15/2012 with an abstract of your proposed talk (250 words).

Panel Abstract:
For much of its disciplinary past, anthropologists have constructed the arts (music, painting, dance, etc) as a unique dimension of human existence. Early anthropological writings were seemingly fascinated in the cultural symbolisms one could read from so-called “primitive” art. Later anthropological observations of places as diverse as pre and post-colonial Bali (Geertz ) and the small English village of Wimbledon with its Thai Buddhist temple (Cate) , have shown how such clearly mapped categories may not be realistically applicable. Art is part of much larger cultural processes often crisscrossing national, emotional and ethnic borders. Nevertheless, despite the recognition given to the arts as a multi-sensory organism with tentacles spreading into diverse cultural and historical universes, many anthropologists have continued to write about the arts as if they were divorced from their scholarly lifeworlds. The arts are an integral part of the social world of their practitioners but these worlds seem to be separated from those of the observing anthropologist. Anthropology and its myriad of theories produces the epistemological language upon which the arts and artists are produced and ‘studied’. Yet, what happens when the anthropologist is himself or herself also an “artist”? In this panel, we will attempt to question the seemingly clear binarisms that have traditionally existed between art and anthropology through a rich ethnographic engagement with the crossings that move between both frames. One question that the panel will focus on is on the process by which ‘art’ is produced - the “how” of art, not merely by its practitioners but also by the anthropologist who is an artist. Like the men and women they study, anthropologists are also engaged in art worlds - they paint, dance, sing, collect art pieces, and so forth. How do anthropologists who are also artists reconcile their own reflective and creative selves with their academic training? How then does this shift the way art is thought about in anthropology and what would an anthropology of art eventually look like when the borders of both disciplines are torn apart?