Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate in the workshop we are organizing to take place at the 7th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) in Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-17 August, 2002. Our panel, entitled "East, West, and the Limits of Civilization," aims to stimulate a critical interdisciplinary conversation on the civilizational discourses, as crystallized in the ever-popular terms of engagement "East" and "West" (the full abstract of the panel is below). We are soliciting papers advancing theoretical interventions and interrogating extant debates, as well as new ethnographic, and preferably comparative, case studies.

PANEL ABSTRACT:

East, West, and the Limits of Civilization

More than three decades after Said's Orientalist, and after voluminous debates and printed word, our scholarly and public discussions are replete with taken-for-granted references to East, West, and their civilizations. Said himself is compelled to comment in a recent article written in the aftermath of September 11 that "edifying labels" like Islam (read the East) and the West continue "mislead and confuse the mind" and the "basic paradigm of West versus the rest ... persist[s], often insidiously and implicitly." Where do the East end and the West begin? Where do we locate Easternness and Westernness? Who claims and has the right to Eastern and Western civilizations? These questions are not new to anthropology but require revisiting. As anthropologists, we are once again confronted to explain and construe the discursive persistence and potency of East and West as analytical, as well as popular, categories. This panel seeks to critically engage and expose the cultural affects and confines of the civilizational discourse. To this end, we intend to bring together theoretical interventions and ethnographic accounts. We encourage contributors to reconsider the rich anthropological record on the subject and respond to the existing theory in reporting field data. Topical emphasis on migration, (transnational) movements and production of culture, city- and media-scapes will be a point of preference.

Please send one-page abstracts and/or draft-papers by email to both conveners. The deadline for submitting abstracts is February 14, 2002.

We are hoping to see you among us in Copenhagen.....

Ay se Calgary & Levant Soys al