The Third University of Chicago Conference on Eurasian Archaeology |
Regimes and Revolutions: Power, Violence, and Labor in Eurasia Between the Ancient and the Modern |
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Registration Information Registration Forms | Accommodations | Transport Options | FINAL PROGRAM Now Available | Previous Conferences | Home Recent decades have witnessed a turn in anthropological archaeology away from totalizing, top-down accounts
of elite power. In their stead, society and politics have come to be theorized within community organizations and more
diffuse locations of authority. But the contemporary politics of Eurasia’s independent states cautions against an
archaeological about-face. Grassroots claims to power can be restricted and communities can be both incapable of, and
disillusioned by, engagement in political struggles. Rulers can indeed hold a firm grasp on political order, exerting
tremendous power, deploying the weapons of coercive violence, and marshalling the forces of labor. The authoritarian politics of the present remind us of the need to consider power and violence in the past.
The modern politics of Eurasia challenge us to disentangle social and economic transformations from political ones and to
probe not only the archaeology of social lives within communities but also the politics—egalitarian, despotic, charismatic,
bureaucratic, traditional—that ordered these lives. What does political authority over the longue durée look like across
Eurasia? What is the role of material culture in preserving regimes and producing revolution? How can we explore the work of
power without subsuming it to the domain of governmental institutions? The 3rd University of Chicago Conference on Eurasian
Archaeology will examine the instruments of power, the semiotics of legitimation, and the mobilization of labor in the
constitution of politics from prehistory to today The University of Chicago Conferences on Eurasian Archaeology bring together graduate students and senior
researchers from institutions across North America, Europe, and Asia. Organized and run by the graduate students of the
University of Chicago, each conference centers on a theme that is intended to encapsulate a broad set of pressing issues in
the field. But the conferences also provide a forum for sharing new data, testing original ideas, and developing
cross-cultural conversations that will forward the next decade of research in Eurasia. MSWord Downloadable: |