FEAR: AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
Call for Papers
In the context of this conference, faculty and graduate
students at the University of Toronto are organizing a symposium
on the topic of FEAR . This symposium examines fear
as an organizing principle of social life, as a consistent
object of ethnographic inquiry, and as a phenomenon with
urgent political stakes in local and global arena. Understanding
what it is that people fear, and how their fear is manifested,
offers powerful insights on cosmologies, epistemologies,
and social relations.
This symposium is open to anyone who would like to participate. We invite anyone interested in organizing a panel or offering a paper on this topic to include the title "FEAR" in the appropriate box on the volunteered paper or the organized session submission form when you make your submission.
Please note: The last date for proposals is 15 February 2007. Unfortunately, we will be unable to accept late submissions.
FEAR
Fear is a fact of life. Understanding what it is that people
fear, and how their fear is manifested, offers powerful insights
on cosmologies, epistemologies, and social relations. Contemporary
fears have many sources, and include fears of extinction,
disease, disaster and chaos; fears about particular spaces
(the urban, the border, what is distant, what is close);
fears about particular kinds of others (terrorists, criminals,
the IMF); and fears expressed in temporal terms about what
has been lost, and what is to come. Fear operates as
an index of moral anxiety, of trauma and memory, and the
sense that menacing, enigmatic forces determine visible outcomes
in the world. States of fear can be deliberately created.
Relationship to conference themes
Central to fear, as anthropologist Mary Douglas ( Purity
and Danger ) identified decades ago, is the positing
of boundaries, and concern with their fragility. Among
the most significant boundaries - often a refraction of
other fears - are those that separate kin from outsiders,
enemies from friends, and people who belong from people
who do not. To secure boundaries people make claims articulated
in terms of indigeneity and national belonging. Prominent
objects of fear are the boundary-crossing migrant, whose
presence contaminates, and the boundary-violating cosmopolitan,
whose movements signal an ungrounded detachment from identifiable
values and commitments. Other objects of fear include more
primordial figures, like the religious fundamentalist or
ethnic nationalist, whose attachments to place and to ideology
are portrayed as overdetermined and uncosmopolitan.
Whether one fears witches or terrorists, criminals or police,
distant others or aliens within, fear animates social experience
and practice around the globe. Scapegoating, collective violence,
militarization, surveillance, profiling, the development
of a transnational security apparatus are among the results. Since
these are practices that aim to make boundaries more secure
they provoke ever-more intense alarm about boundary crossing.
Local significance
In Canada, fear and its effects are prominent features of
social life. Concerns about illegal human trafficking, immigration,
integration, security, corruption, disease, family and territorial
sovereignty figure in the Canadian landscape, as they do
elsewhere in the global north and south. The City of Toronto
is site where fears are easily generated. Heralded as one
of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, its central
metaphor of the cultural mosaic is one of boundaries as much
as it is of blending. When looked at carefully, the mosaic
comprises a collection of discreet, even oppositional units
where anxieties abound. Fears are made manifest in the gendered
racialization of gun violence, the classing of accented English,
and the spatialization of risk, to name but a few.
Purpose of the symposium
In organizing this symposium, the Anthropology Department
at the University of Toronto aims to stimulate serious discussion
of fear as organizing principle of contemporary social life,
as a consistent object of anthropological inquiry, and as
a phenomenon with urgent political stakes in local and global
arena. We welcome contributions from scholars of diverse
disciplines, graduate students and faculty.
We invite anyone interested in organizing a panel or offering a paper on this topic to include the title “FEAR” in the appropriate box on the volunteered paper or the organized session submission form when you make your submission.
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