Theme

The American Ethnological Society spring conference, to be held at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from March 20–22, 2025, invites scholars to consider whether archipelagos and “archipelagic thinking” can aid us to analyze pressing global challenges across cultures, geographies, climates, disciplines, and methodologies.

Archipelagos are island chains formed in a body of water from coral reefs, seafloor volcanoes, sedimentary or tectonic action, sea level rise, or human agency.[1] Such “chains” may compose sovereign island states large and small (i.e. Indonesia; Cape Verde, Bahamas, and Maldives, etc.), territories of “mainland” nation-states (i.e. Puerto Rico, Scotland’s Shetland Islands, etc.), and components of governmental units within the nation-state, such as Boston’s Harbor Islands in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There are also continental archipelagos like British Columbia’s Inside Passage^[2] and fabricated archipelagic island cities like Venice or Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah and World Islands.

Contemporary archipelagic political economies have emerged alongside the development of nation-states. Conceived as the colonial and neocolonial “offshore,” such territories have provided legal and financial flexibility, exemptions from metropolitan rule, sites of imprisonment and quarantine of vulnerable, mobile populations, and reservoirs of resources, labor, and leisure. Amid vulnerabilities to environmental and climatic forces, such spatial, material, and geopolitical formations have prefigured how the excesses of capitalism negatively affect human livability.

Archipelagos have also generated new conceptual, ideological, and theoretical models that transcend material boundaries and borders. Scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, Epeli Hau’ofa, and Katherine McKittrick argue that archipelagos provoke profound questions about spatiality, sovereignty, humanity, and otherness. French literary theorist Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) offers “archipelagic thinking” as a model to encourage multiplicity and connections without flattening material and conceptual differences. As landscapes, archipelagos produce new ways to conceive relatedness in which the variations of material topographies and imagined communities remain connected—despite ruptures, fragmentation, and dislocation—through digital and other immaterial means. Archipelagic social and kinship networks have contributed to anthropology’s seminal concept of gift-exchange in small-scale, “premodern” societies. Archipelagos have also contributed models of “creolization,” processes in which identities, sexualities, economies, languages, and cultures mix creatively—despite the violences and traumas that colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and other related political movements have engendered.

Can archipelagic thinking truly produce Glissant’s “one-world” (tout-monde)—an interrelated network that encourages encounter and transformation across species—without permitting forces of globalization to homogenize and harm all our relations? What kinds of social obligations, forms of care, or exclusions undergird contemporary archipelagic formations? How is value identified, circulated, exchanged, and even commodified in archipelagic economies? Might the reparative plans, designs, and architecture of archipelagic communities like those in Hawai’i provide pathways to repair anthropocentric harms? Or, as opponents of Indonesia’s plans to relocate its capital to the planned city, Nusantara (Javanese for “archipelago”) argue, might such efforts negatively impact endangered species, Indigenous groups, and the environment?[3] How might “archipelagos” inform discussions of technology, governance, sovereignty, mobility, speech, and freedom, whether political or academic?

Our keynote speaker is David Scott, the Ruth and William Lubic Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Additional speakers include Vicente Diaz, Nidhi Mahajan, Garth Myers, and Mimi Sheller, among others to be announced.

Please join us!

ECJ

Submissions & Hotel Information

Submissions due January 15, 2025

Hotel information and submission portal will go live in early December.

Questions

For questions about the Archipelagos conference, please contact Erica Caple James at the following email address: aes2025.archipelagos@gmail.com.

References

[1] See https://geology.com/maps/archipelago/, July 22, 2024.

[2] See https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/archipelago.html, July 22, 2024.

[3] See Tarigan and Milko 2023, https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-capital-kalimantan-climate-borneo-environment-eb0f8ad12e07bb105546296d88192834, accessed July 17, 2024.