Hosted by the Wits Anthropology Department

6-8 September 2013

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Preliminary call for papers and panels:

How do people take others into account? What do we find interesting in other lives, and how do they become valuable, trivial, threatening, obscure or puzzling to us? How do our capacities for recognizing other lives depend on the work of particular kinds of social forms, relations, mediations and representations? A renewed interest in these elementary questions about mutuality has produced a wealth of new thinking in the humanities and human sciences in recent years. Questions about the conditions and the limits of mutuality are also of major importance for our understanding of pressing issues to do with inequality, solidarity, hospitality and violence.

For this year's ASnA Conference, to be hosted by Wits Anthropology on 6-8 September 2013 in Johannesburg, we invite proposals for papers and panels broadly addressing the theme of 'mutuality and its limits'. Within this rubric, we especially encourage participants to consider the ways in which new work in African anthropology is reorienting and revitalizing the discipline.

Please send proposals for papers or for panels to the organizers by 1 June 2013. Proposals should include name, affiliation, paper/panel title and an abstract of no more than 250 words. For panel proposals, please include a list of prospective participants if these have already been identified. Proposals should be sent to asnaconference2013@gmail.com.