News and Call for AAA 2009 MIG Proposals

As many of you have probably surmised, Susanne Kuehling was elected as convener elect for the Melanesia Interest Group. She and I will be in touch with many of you as we organize for next years AAAs. On that note, we are still soliciting ideas for panels and we hope that those of you heading off to the ASAO meetings this week will give some thought/ discussion to topics and themes that would fit the bill of a Melanesian Interest Group session. MIG sessions have always sought to communicate the relevance of Melanesia to a wider audience, and typically include comparisons within the Pacific and with other regions of the world.

The theme for next year’s meetings suggests many possibilities along these lines and is titled “The End/s of Anthropology.” The AAA invites considerations of the end as ‘both conclusions and purposes,’ and I would think that the overlap of these two meanings would speak to certain sensibilities in the Pacific. Conference organizers have suggested the following sub-foci: The end/s of relativism, the end/s of identity, and the end/s of publics. All of which are certainly areas in which MIG members have expertise.

For further elaboration on the theme please see: http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/presenters/Meeting-Theme.cfm


Also I’d like to invite folks to join us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26280881106


Cheers,

Jamon Halvaksz and Susanne Kuehling