Call for Proposals:

Dear Colleagues,

We invite you to participate in the workshop we are organizing at the 8th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Vienna, Austria, 8-12 September 2004. Our panel, entitled " Minority Rights, Culture, and Anthropology," seeks to stimulate a critical interdisciplinary conversation on affinities and dissonances between minority rights, culture, and the discipline and practice of anthropology (the full abstract of the workshop is below). We are soliciting papers advancing theoretical interventions and interrogating extant debates, as well as new ethnographic, and preferably comparative, case studies.

Please send your proposals by email to both conveners.

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

Reetta Toivanen & Levent Soysal

Workshop Abstract: Minority Rights, Culture, and Anthropology

What is the place of social anthropology in the field of anti-discrimination law and minority rights? Such concepts as culture, tradition, ethnicity, nation or race are core concepts of anthropological thinking and analysis. Simultaneously, they play an important role in international legislation on human rights, especially when lawyers deal with minority right issues. Thus, jurisprudence may legally entitle peoples to their cultures or may deny them the corresponding rights. As the concepts used in the courtrooms are never of a neutral origin, social anthropologists are increasingly paying attention to the problems related to "struggles over cultural rights". How can anthropology help us to engage and rethink the powerful of frameworks of human rights and to take the concept of equality seriously, as well as reconsidering its own core analytical constructs in the process? Until 29 July 2003 all EU member states should have adopted a new EU anti-discrimination directive ("race-directive") into their national legislations. While most of the states certainly had tried hard to meet the requirements in time, a great number of them still failed. The arguments used by state representatives and NGO-activists reveal a lot about European societies, as both old and new EU members make a rather tactical use of the transposition. The workshop aims to take the "race-directive" and recent case law produced by the European Court of Human Rights as an empirical basis for conceptual and theoretical discussions. We encourage potential contributors to submit paper proposals (no longer that 250 words), tackling with questions of minority rights, anti-racism, and anti-discrimination and initiating an in-depth debate on the use of the above mentioned "core concepts" of anthropology and their possible consequences as they relate to the field of human rights and its practice today in the world and in particular in Europe.

(Please note that the title of the workshop is misprinted as “Anti-discrimination and Culture” in the print version of EASA’s Call for Proposals.)