6th Annual McGill Anthropology Graduate Student Conference

Anthropologies of Unconformity: Erosions, Depositions, and (Trans)formations

McGill University Friday March 21, 2014 We invite the submission of papers which explore anthropological topics, concepts and methods through the rich metaphorical terrain of the geological & archaeological concept unconformity.

Unconformity: A surface representing a major period of erosion separating two rock masses of different ages; a surface of nondeposition that is a break between two rock or sediment units indicating that sediment deposition was not continuous. They may represent substantial periods for which a depositional record is lacking. In general, the older layer was exposed to erosion for an interval of time before deposition of the younger, but the term is used to describe any break in the sedimentary geologic record.1

The geological & archaeological recordsand their gapsprovide a concrete location where time is made tangible and material. As an analytic, unconformity allows us to ask about the configurations of pasts, presents, and futures which emerge through processes of erosion, deposition, and (material) transformation. How might we use unconformity to engage with anthropological historiesoccluded, eroded, or hidden? Geologists and archaeologists often attempt to reconstruct a gap in the record through only sparse traces: rounded pebbles, nonlinear strata, or abraded stone tools left behind in the bottom of an eroding stream. An anthropology of unconformities provokes us to think through the productive bridging of presence and absence; the known and the unknown; the visible and the invisible; the old and the new; the mobile and the immobile. How do these processes at once hide and erase, while simultaneously laying down and shaping forms of the future?

Unconformities thus also invite a consideration of the composition of the present, and how sediments from disparate places and periods configure the topography of the contemporary. How, we might ask, has the deposition of histories materialized in the architecture of Chinese multi-drug resistant tuberculosis wards? How are unconform local and global rationalities layered in the production of Global Mental Health? Likewise, the exploration of unconformities we invite here would take seriously the multiplicities made visible in an ice core, drilled from a single moving piece of glacier, which at once tell us about 800,000 years of history and herald a compromised environmental future. Or, how the plague bacterium picked up animal DNA millions of years ago before getting entangled with fleas, rats and humans, causing an epidemic panic in India in the 1990s. Submitted papers are welcome to take up these themes in creative and unanticipated ways, but in the spirit of promoting a generative and lively conversation, we ask: ! How do concepts of intrusion, difference, rupture, and discontinuity speak to anthropological curiosities? ! How are gaps in history, in the record, or gaps in continuity identified, recorded, interpreted, or lived with? ! How does anthropology engage with residuals, what is left behind, traces, artifacts, and the material? ! How are anthropological excavations implicated in the shapes of contemporary topographies/landscapes? Conversely, how are the spaces in which we work productive of our own analytics? Submit your short abstracts (250 words) to anthrogradmcgill@gmail.com by December 31, 2013. Please include your name, university affiliation, and contact information. You will be notified of the reception of your abstract by January 10, 2014. Feel free to use the provided email to contact us with any questions.1

Kipfer, Barbara Ann, ed. 2000. Encyclopedic dictionary of archaeology. Springer: New York. Image: Clerk, John. 1787. Huttons Unconformity at Jedburgh, Scotland (illustration).