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Council for Museum Anthropology Tour
The CMA reception will be held on Friday, November 21 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the de Young Museum Golden Gate Park San Francisco.Everyone is invited, the reception is not limited to CMA members.

The $30 per person subscription fee includes roundtrip bus transportation from the Hilton Hotel, a cocktail reception, and special curator-guided tours. The bus will leave the hotel at 5:45 p.m. and depart the museum at 8:45 p.m.

About the de Young Museum: Founded in 1895 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the de Young Museum has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city and a cherished destination for millions of residents and visitors to the region for over 100 years. In 2005 the de Young Museum re-opened in a state-of-the-art new facility that integrates art, architecture and the natural landscape in one multi-faceted destination that will inspire audiences from around the world. Designed by the renowned Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron and Fong and Chan Architects in San Francisco, the new de Young provides San Francisco with a landmark art museum to showcase the museum's priceless collections of American art from the 17th through the 20th centuries, and art of the native Americas, Africa, and the Pacific.  REGISTRATION OPENS MONDAY September 8th

• Society for the Anthropology of Europe
  The Society for the Anthropology of Europe will hold a luncheon from noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday at the San Francisco Hilton and Towers. Each discussion leader will be at a separate table with up to 7 participants. Use the advance registration form on the AAA website to buy a ticket. Indicate your table selection in order of preference in the spaces provided on the form. Reservations are filled on a first come, first serve basis. Ticket cancellations are non-refundable. Tickets will be mailed two weeks before the meeting. Organizer: Jennifer Patico (Georgia State U).
  
  
• Table 1 - COMMUNICATIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN EASTERN EUROPE: SKYPE, CELL PHONES, EMAIL AND MORE
  Moderator: Krisztine Fehervary (U Michigan)
  The fall of state socialism in east central Europe and its restrictions on mobility and communication was followed by an explosion in new forms of technology facilitating communication - locally as well as transnationally. How many of us have had our first experience with Skype, for example, initiated by friends once accessible only by telegraph or snail mail? This roundtable proposes discussing the ramifications for modes of sociality of technologies that allow for communicative exchange. Such gadgets play a role in normative consumption for middle-class status in how they index belonging in a mobile, connected, cutting-edge citizenry. Beyond their function as markers of distinction, however, how do email, Skype, and so forth make possible interactions and intimacies with faraway kin and also with friends and acquaintances? With such possibilities for participation in transnational communities, how are understandings of ones' position in the world modified by such practices? How does internet use differentiate or unite generations? Do interactive modalities affect an expanded sense of the self (rather than the mimesis of t.v./film), or might they introduce normative restrictions otherwise not there? What are the roles of various internet gaming relationships, particularly by youth, in modifying perceptions of the nation-state and its importance in daily life? Finally, how have our own practices and position as ethnogrpahers been transformed by such possibilities for immediate communication?
  
  
• Table 2 - INTELLECTUALS, COSMOPOLITANISM, AND INTERNATIONALISM IN EUROPE
  Moderator: Amy Ninetto (Rice U)
  Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European nationalisms have often stressed the role of intellectuals and other "cultural producers" in creating and managing national identities. From poets, sculptors, composers, and painters to journalists, filmmakers, and architects, to physicists, engineers, and urban planners, the practices and rhetorics of professional intellectuals have often attempted to articulate and inculcate modes of belonging and specific solidarities. Yet contemporary intellectuals' engagements with the nation-state are transforming with new conditions of intellectual labor, including privatization, the imposition of regimes of accountability and standardization, and a reduction of state support and public prestige. Professional commitments and loyalties may now lie beyond or outside the nation-state, and intellectuals may claim a self-conscious cosmopolitanism for themselves, their professions, and their countries. This roundtable will discuss the role(s) of intellectuals in defining and delineating contemporary Europe. Some questions for discussion could include: How do the professional practices of cultural producers shape and disrupt senses of belonging, locality, and community across European and post-socialist spaces? What specific cosmopolitanisms and alternatives or reactions to cosmopolitanism are emerging? How do intellectuals in post-socialist spaces orient themselves toward Europe or Asia? How is intellectual life "styled" commensurate with projects aiming to craft national and European belonging and distinction? How do the "Europes" of intellectuals compare to those of other professional groups? What similarities and differences can we see between — to use the Soviet-era terms — "literary-artistic" and "scientific-technical" intelligentsias? How do "brain drain" and other forms of (virtual and real) mobility shape the practices of intellectuals?
  
  
• Table 3 - EUROPEAN DIFFICULTIES, EUROPEAN ACCOLADES
  Moderator: Levent Soysal (Kadir Has U)
  In a recent essay, Perry Anderson states that "an epiphany is beguiling Europe. Far from dwindling in historical significance, the Old World is about to assume an importance for humanity it has never, in all its days of dubious past glory, before possessed" (LRB, September 2007). Then he enlists opinion makers from both sides of the Atlantic, from Tony Judt to Jurgen Habermas, from Jeremy Rifkin to Ulrich Beck, to encapsulate the "current repertoire of tributes." Against tributes offered by intellectuals, there is the litany of difficulties that Europe inarguably faces today, in no particular order: democratic deficit, distrust of Brussels, incompleteness of institutions, decline of welfare state, race relations, consequences of single monetary regime, aging population, low growth, unemployment, reactions against constitution, terrorism, security, Islam, enlargement, Turkey's membership, Cyprus question, migration, Europe's identity or lack thereof, role and prestige of Europe in the world at large. The list is undeniably interminable, quandaries abound. Anderson asserts that "the emergence of the Union may be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie; [y]et the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties." This roundtable aims to discuss the current conundrum of Europe enfolding amidst pronouncements of import and veracity of troubles. Moving from Anderson's insightful scrutiny, we will not only attempt to assess the worth of accolades, limits of difficulties, and their associations, but also the implications of tributes and tribulations for the ethnography of Europe — potentialities for, impediments before investigating European futures.
  
  
• Table 4 - EXPERIMENTAL IDENTITIES
  Moderator: Douglas Holmes (Binghamton Univ)
  The imperatives of European integration are inciting identity experiments, often involving dissonant and unstable forms of consciousness, that defy or exceed familiar categories of analysis. Rather than a mere shift in identity from, say, being German, Irish or Latvian to being European, a fundamental change in the underlying dynamics of identity formation is underway. Identities are coalescing on the level of intimate encounters, expressed in obscure and arcane cultural vernaculars, by which experience gains highly pluralist articulations posing unusual analytical challenges. We will explore in this roundtable how the people of Europe are at the outset of the twenty-first century negotiating among liberal and illiberal registers of consciousness, and how these shifting configurations typically do not succumb to a single, stable, and unambiguous expression. What we awkwardly and imprecisely term "identity" has acquired a twofold nature. On the one hand, it is not merely or solely contingent on convention, tradition, and the past, but has assumed a future-oriented purview and experimental dynamic. On the other, citizens of the EU as they pursue these experiments are continually parsing the nature of cultural affinity and difference as they participate in the creation of a vast, multiracial and multicultural Europe. We will orient the discussion towards addressing how the EU imparts to its citizens the distinctive challenge and the ambiguous burden to negotiate continually the cognitive meanings and political exigencies of a pluralist Europe.
  
  
• Table 5 - PRACTICING CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE
  Moderator: Emanuela Guano (Georgia State Univ)
  At least since the 1980s, anthropologists have consistently approached the state as a fluid entity that is embodied in places, people, rituals, and things through everyday practice and discourse. The social-scientific scholarship on citizenship as the relationship between individuals and the state, however, is still characterized by predominantly abstract, theoretical models that would benefit from an ethnographic approach. This roundtable explores citizenship in contemporary Europe as a form of practice, and it focuses on the everyday strategies through which citizens negotiate their rights and obligations vis-à-vis the state. The range of possible topics we will tackle includes, but is not limited to: corruption and clientelism; anti-state discourse and ideologies; civicness debates, and anti-political movements.
  
  
• Table 6 - A CULTURE OF LAWLESSNESS? JUVENILE CRIMINALITY IN EUROPE TODAY
  Moderator: Jack Murphy (New York Univ)
  Over the past three decades or so, reported juvenile criminal activity, including both violent and non-violent crime, has risen sharply across Europe. Not surprisingly, this trend has received considerable attention in the news media and by various political actors, giving rise to two prevailing though mutually exclusive discourses: Some commentators have emphasized age, blaming the increase in juvenile lawlessness witnessed of late on the emergence of a generalized "youth culture of criminality," characterized on the one hand by the formation of gangs and gang mentalities and on the other by corrosive individualist leanings. Other observers have cast responsibility, in contrast, on specific groups of people, pointing instead to growing social rifts along racial, ethnic, gender, and/or class lines that extend well beyond "youth" as a single category. At the same time, juvenile criminality has become an important theme in popular culture, expressed through music (rap, hip-hop, R&B) and film, for example. This roundtable provides an opportunity to explore how a focus on the phenomenon of youth criminality can provide insights into wider social processes in Europe. Possible questions for consideration include the following: How, why, and to what effect have different interpretations of juvenile criminal behavior been called upon, by whom and where? How do people in general — and young people in particular, including those who are law-abiding — interpret and mobilize representations of juvenile criminality in their everyday lives, and what might this tell us about how they organize their social world? Specifically, which social distinctions (age, class, gender, ethnicity, race, etc.) seem most important to them, when and why?