My first day’s impression (December 1st) wasn’t that great, although it started out good. My first session was Bringing the past (back) into the present: Exploring the Present Tense of History in Queer Lives - Part II. I don’t have a great deal of experience with gender theory in anthropology, but the chair of the anthropology department at American University, where I went, was speaking on this panel.

The talk that stood out the most to me was one by Deborah Elliston. Her paper was entitled Queer History and its Discontents at Tahiti: The Contested Politics of Modernity and Sexual Subjectivity. In this paper, she discussed the mahu and rairai of Tahiti and how these two groups of people create and are created by historical, economic, and social forces in Tahiti. The Mahu are male-bodied but present a female persona in public. They dress in female clothes and affect female speech patterns They are accepted by the community and form this gendered identity is adolescence. The rairai are also male-bodied, but perform a female gender internally and externally. The mahu have more of a ritualized place in the society while the rairai often perform as sex workers. Elliston tied the rise of the rairai to the 1960s, when the French colonial authority poured a great deal of money and people into the area, in order to facilitate transfer of their nuclear weapons testing from newly independent Algeria to the South Pacific. With the influx of capital, and men to spend it, the rairai started servicing these foreigners for cash. Internal to the society, there was an attempt to assert who was the truest mahu, between the two groups. The rairai said the traditional mahu weren’t true to their gendered identity, while the mahu asserted their traditional role as their authenticity. It was a really exciting talk.

After that session, I went to In the Name of Security: Anthropology in the Age of Surveillance. This was a good preaching to the choir session. This was one of the closest talks to what I do at work; however, there were no solutions offered. The speakers simply talked about the horrible state of our national and foreign policy, but they didn’t provide any options for how we should fight back. My last session on Thursday was Reinscribing the State: Governmentalities of Globalization. This was predominantly a student panel and the presentations weren’t delivered in the best of ways. The topics were intriguing and more time or a roundtable discussion with the authors would have been much more valuable.