From: mwolf-m-AT-bgnet.bgsu.edu
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 00:37:50 -0500
Subject: CFP: "Ethnography & Everyday Life"


Dear List Members:

This is the first year that the Popular Culture Associate conference 
will be hosting an area dedicated to "Ethnography & Everyday Life" – 
what might be more widely thought of simply as "anthropology."  It's my 
hope as area chair to bring more anthropologists (as well as 
sociologists) into the Popular Culture Association, which is generally 
inundated by more textual approaches (scholars with literary studies 
backgrounds).  While the Birmingham School of cultural studies largely 
founded the employment of ethnography in popular culture studies, as a 
method it has latterly been decreasing in use.  The crisis in 
ethnography seemed to formally divorce contemporary culture studies from 
anthropology and sociology, and it now seems appropriate to reintroduce 
the three disciplines.  Similarly, the relationship between popular 
culture and everyday life is often elided in favor of monological "thick 
descriptions" of the popular discourse at hand.  Situating shared 
popular culture with the sort of individual accounts that ethnography 
provides will do well to further popular culture studies as a whole.

I should also clarify for those of you who don't normally focus on 
popular culture that "popular culture" isn't the same as "pop" culture.  
Inasmuch as the two are interrelated, "pop" culture is properly music, 
cinema, genre literature, comic books, etc.  Basically, if it can be 
bought or implies an audience, it's "pop."  "Popular" culture, 
conversely, extends to include all of the shared lived experiences of 
everyday life.  As such it includes things from political and religious 
discourses to matters of kinship and language.  "Popular culture 
studies" is really an anthropology of modernity, but as an organization, 
the PCA has largely eschewed the discipline (and seemingly vice versa).  
But that is not to say that these approaches are unwelcome: Studies of 
both "popular" and "pop" culture are encouraged at the PCA.

If this year's "Ethnography & Everyday Life" area is well populated with 
papers, and well attended, it will become a fixture at the PCA meetings 
in future years, providing anthropologists and sociologists with yet 
another avenue for sharing their research.  The PCA also has a history 
of choosing very desirable locales for its meetings, this year’s being 
New Orleans (April 16th – 19th, 2003), so at the very least it can be a 
fine vacation.  I hope that the area will succeed, and I look forward to 
your participation.

100 word abstracts are due by September 10th and can be sent to me care 
of <mwolfmeyer-AT-reconstruction.ws>.  If you have any questions or 
concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me.  Please forward this 
message to possible participants.

Information on the PCA can be found at: 
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~pcaaca/pop.html

Best wishes,

Matthew Wolf-Meyer
http://www.reconstruction.ws




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