Annual Meeting:
2009 Annual Meeting “Weaving Across Time and Space: The Political Economy of Textiles”, April 2-4, 2009 at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles.
Co-Chairs: Walter E. Little (SUNY-Albany) and Patricia A. McAnany (UNC, Chapel Hill), Host: Charles Stanish (UCLA-Cotsen Institute)
Call For Papers
Textiles have been a central part of the economies and politics of human societies across culture divides and over millennia. The economy of textiles provides insight into the fabric of social relations, local and global politics, and diverse ideologies. Textile production and exchange represent a key node for the intersections of multiple aspects of ancient and modern economies, including social-class relations, gender, tourism, exchange, commerce, and trans-polity relationships. A political economy of textiles, discussed from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, offers ways to understand cloth and clothing as parts of mutually constitutive processes that shape and reflect economic practices, cultural ideologies, and socio-political rank.
Clothing is a material element of society that fosters the study of continuities and disjunctions in the economic and social realities of past and present societies. From stick-loom weaving to transnational factories, the production of cloth and its transformation into clothing and other woven goods offers a way to study the linkages between economics and politics.
Paper and Poster-presentation Topics
Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to, the following, as they relate to economic practices:
A. Textile production. From ancient to contemporary periods, how has textile production articulated with household, regional and global economies? How have techniques of production remained constant or changed over time? How are relations between gender and power constituted by techniques of production?
B. Textiles as trade goods. How do textiles function in ancient and contemporary exchange systems as gifts and commodities? What mechanisms bring textiles into and out of the household and the marketplace? What is the role of textile commodities in core-hinterland economic relations (past and present) and exchange across political boundaries?
C. Textiles as symbols. How are textiles important media for political and religious iconography? Symbolically embedded, how have elaborate textiles been and continue to be markers of social or political standing? How is ethnicity reflected by fabric styles, as well as sacred elements of belief systems and cosmology?
D. Textiles in touristic process. What role does indigenous textile production play in tourism? How do tourist and indigenous economic exchanges impact textile production and local economic conditions? What futures does tourism development hold for handcrafted textiles and their producers?
E. Textiles within transnational process. How are traditional textiles connected to the global economy and what kinds of economic, political, and social capital are encompassed by these handicrafts? What changes have large clothing factories that employ outsourced labor for multinational industries precipitated in developing and developed countries? Why have these factories been a focus of controversy among both state authorities and activists concerned with globalization and its effects on the developing world?
Poster presentations
At the annual conference, the SEA always welcomes posters on any topic in economic anthropology. Students and scholars whose work may not fit the central theme of the meeting are encouraged to submit a poster. The special poster session/reception during the meeting is inclusive and a major event of the SEA conference. Poster presenters who focus on the meeting theme may be asked to complete a finished paper for publication in the annual volume.
The SEA meetings provide a rare opportunity for a focused and coherent program of presentation, with time for critical discussion in a convivial intellectual setting. About 15 papers are selected from abstracts for a program that allows 20 minutes for presentation and 20 minutes for discussion in a single plenary session over two days; around 30 additional abstracts will be selected for the poster session. Each SEA conference also produces a book on the conference theme. Submitting a paper for the plenary session represents a commitment that you wish to be considered for inclusion in this volume.
We encourage archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, economists, historians, geographers and other social scientists concerned with economy-textile linkages. Send an abstract for a paper or poster of 400-600 words to Walter Little at wlittle@albany.edu or Department of Anthropology, AS 245, University at Albany SUNY, 1400 Washington Ave, Albany, NY 12222 by December 1, 2008.
Past Meetings:
Selected papers from the 2008 Annual Meeting on "Cooperation in Social and Economic Life" held in Cincinnati will be presented in an Presidential Invited Session at the 2008 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco.
For information about past meetings, including themes, programs, and abstracts, click here.
