Call for Abstracts for a Panel for the 115th American Anthropological Association Meeting

(November 16-20th, 2016, Minneapolis, MN)

Title: Toward an Anthropology of Return
Organizers: Charles A. McDonald (The New School for Social Research) and Mikaela RogozenSoltar (The University of Nevada).
Discussant: Jonathan Shannon (CUNY Graduate Center).
Description: The concept of return is increasingly common as both an analytic framework for
scholarship and an anchoring rhetoric for a variety of kinds of social projectspolitical,
religious, linguistic, migratory, artistic, and environmental, among others. Nation-states and
diasporic populations alike have made claims in the name of rectifying or ameliorating historical
traumas by returning people, places, and objects to their cultural or geographical origins.
Whether we look to states who alternately promise and refuse rights of return in the form of
citizenship and the collective im/mobilities they shape; global political economies and
bureaucratic structures premised on recasting ruined livelihoods and landscapes as cultural
heritage; debates over the entangled capacities of ecosystems and technologies to return the
planet to natural or sustainable states; or the staggering success of cultural and religious
revivals that positions themselves against or beyond state power; concepts of return animate
and refigure scales of selfhood, distributions of rights and property, distinctions between nature
and culture, and modes of apprehending space and time.
We seek panelists who will engage the 2016 AAA Meeting theme of Evidence, Accident,
Discovery to ask what kinds of evidence, knowledge, and materialities are marshaled to prompt
or justify returns, when these terms are acceded to, and when they are refused, redirected, or
transformed. Our goal is to collaboratively work out the analytical purchase of the concept of
return, considering its contemporary ethnographic manifestations and theoretical value for
anthropological research. Collectively, panelists will consider the following parameters of return:

Who and what are the subjects and objects of return? What political economic
configurations shape who is included and excluded from particular projects of return?
What are the temporalities and directions of return? Is return always (or only) a
movement backward in time or space? When and how might return also be a futureoriented project or herald movement and momentum forward?
How can we think about return in relation to nostalgia, longing, or hope, and in relation
to necessity, pragmatics, or ethical obligation?
What are the modes and routes of return for people and things? Does return happen in a
straightforward, linear process? When is it circuitous, or interrupted?
How do contingency, accident, and discovery shape projects of return? How do people
involved in various kinds of return evaluate returns as finished, successful, disappointing,
partial, failed, and/or as bringing about unexpected results?

Topical concerns and geographic contexts might including but should not be limited to:
Return migration (of labor migrants, diasporic communities, or refugees)

Return after disasters, forced departures, or evictions; and forced returns, return-asdeportation
Revivals of traditional practices in a variety of contexts (religious revivals, linguistic
revival projects, historically-oriented artisanal agriculture and food movements)
Return as repatriation (of human remains, artifacts, goods, stolen property)
Return as recalibration of ethics
Return and riskeconomic calculations of return in policy and economic fields
Return as restoration (of the environment, of neighborhoods, landscapes)
Ethnographic returnsreturn to and from the field and the role of return as intrinsic to
anthropological practice
Return as a solution to crisis

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar

(mikaelars@unr.edu) and Charles A. McDonald (mcdoc390@newschool.edu) by Monday,
March 28th.