MULTIDIMENSIONAL

Friday, November 20, 2015: 8:00 AM-9:45 AM

Mineral Hall B (Hyatt Regency)

How do we think, feel and act dimensionally? As Clifford Geertz put it, ethnography as method ideally involves “deep” hanging-out in order to produce “thick” description, in order to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Such recourse to idioms of depth and thickness suggests that there is an under-acknowledged dimensionality to anthropological modes of research and writing, an ethical and epistemological mandate to work through and across dimensions. What would it mean to explicitly thematize dimensionality? Can we consider the ways in which dimensionality inflects our research and writing, as well as the ways in which the phenomena we study partake of particular dimensions? How do we construe dimensionality? How is dimensionality enacted? How are certain dimensions neglected in order to allow others to come into view? Is dimension a question of scale, of “adding a new dimension” or “taking into account the broader dimensions?” Or does dimensionality refuse such simple addition and subtraction?

This session would be of particular interest to:
Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Organizers:  Bharat J Venkat (Princeton University)

Chairs:  Orit Halpern (New School for Social Research)

Discussants:  Gaymon Bennett (Arizona State University)

8:00 AM
Thin Skies, Thick Data: Astronomical Science in the Atacama Desert
Katheryn M Detwiler (The New School for Social Research)

8:15 AM
A History of the Third Dimension
Bharat J Venkat (Princeton University)

8:30 AM
Diagnoses of Dementia, Couples, and the Depth of Suspicion
Laurence Tessier (Centre de sociologie de l’innovation)

8:45 AM
Vault Dust: Density and Desire in the Digital Archive
Dwaipayan Banerjee (Dartmouth College) and Ernesto de Carvalho (New York University)

9:00 AM
Discussant
Gaymon Bennett (Arizona State University)

9:15 AM
Discussion

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