The Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology is moving, for the first time, to a new Spring Conference format.  These meetings will be held every two years, beginning in Mérida, Mexico in 2013, following the city of Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2015.  We are calling for abstracts that respond to the theme selected for the conference. 

Conference theme:

Post-National Transformations: Culture and Politics in the Greater Latin America and the Caribbean.  In the second half of the twentieth century, politics, economics and culture lead societies into what theoreticians have called the post-national condition. On the one hand, nation-states had been forced to let go, or at least to understate, the unifying vision of a single ‘national’ culture, and to admit inter- and multi- cultural diversity; on the other hand, economic and political entities transcending the nation-state, such as the UN, NATO, NAFTA, the EU, the WB, the IMF, the OECD, and transnational corporations, impose internal rules and conditions to the everyday workings of people in nation-states.  The development of communication and media technologies that make it possible to have instant communication, and to move financial capital across great distances, has supported both the expression of difference and the enforcement of general trans- and supra- national policies.  Within this general context we have seen a resurgence of regional, national and minority identities (ethnic, cultural, religious, gendered, age-based and body-centered), and witnessed how in the end of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries governments struggle to re-draw state boundaries and gain control over the flows of goods, capitals and people.  This conference brings together anthropologists working in Latin America, the Caribbean, or with groups of Latin American and Caribbean origin anywhere, to look at the politics surrounding culture at this stage of our common post-national and postcolonial condition, and at the forms, strategies, tactics, and practices of negotiation, resistance, opposition and transformation that emerge under this global condition.

We invite SLACA members in all sub-disciplines of anthropology to propose sessions within this broad theme, reflecting the different sub-disciplinary understandings of related issues.

SLACA 4th Spring Conference

Post-National Transformations:
Culture and Politics in the Greater Latin America
and the Caribbean

Mérida, Mexico

March 20 - 22, 2013