Anthropology

The Anthropology Topic Session called for papers related to the conference theme of "Social Salvation" in the context of ecological, political, and cultural challenges.Three scholars were invited to speak in this year's session.Valentina Nilo's paper, entitled "The Victim's Resistance as Salvation: A Decolonial Approach to the Reality of Imprisoned Women in Latin America," brought the resources of decolonial analysis to bear on the artistic expressions of women incarcerated in Mexico and Chile, whom Nilo has come to know personally.Nilo argued that these women's artistic expression-especially poetry-should be seen as a form of resistance to oppression that makes present the interiority, hope, and social connections of women who are otherwise isolated and alienated from society.Expressions of hope and resistance should be seen within the context of an extractive war waged on women and women's bodies to constrain and control them.Building community through artistic expression is a praxis of hope that maintains agency in contexts of oppression.And while this resistance does not effect the much-needed transformation of the carceral system as it is driven by capitalist forces, it nevertheless holds open the possibility of another way of life, a step toward building a transformed and transformative community.Timothy Perron gave a presentation entitled "Human Ecology as an Approach to Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Vatican Documents."Perron's presentation examined the magisterial discussion of ethical questions surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality through the category of "human ecology," first appearing in Centessimus Annus in 1991.While Vatican texts employ the concept of human ecology in order to support ethical positions on sex, gender, and sexuality that are grounded in a compulsory, complementary gender/sex binary essentialism, Perron argues that the appeal to the category of "ecology" necessarily opens a door onto greater flexibility in these positions.Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Perron argues that ecology always attends to the broad patterns in relationships among organisms as they respond to their ever-changing contexts.An evolutionary view of biology, build in to ecology, requires attention to the way that the patterns of relationships change over time-and is illsuited to articulation of unchanging and hardened laws.While Perron did not specify the particular shifts that greater flexibility around matters of sex, gender, and sexuality might take within Vatican texts, he believes that "human ecology" invites new possibilities, possibilities that have been largely closed off by reliance on assertions of an abstract binary essentialism.In a presentation entitled, "Risking Resurrection: Agency, Phenomenology, and the Feminist Ethic of Risk," Madeline Jarrett argued for an approach to structural and cultural patterns rooted in an ethic of empowerment and risk rather than control,