Meetings

This book is an exploration of how this remarkably efficient and familiar form of gathering operates, in different times and places, and how it comes to be recognised by those who experience or deploy it. Throws the spotlight on the epistemological and ontological basis of coming together through formal meetings of different kinds Demonstrates how meetings - socially and institutionally prescribed spaces for coming together - are important and ubiquitous organisational forms in various political, religious and economic settings  Shows how meetings feature prominently in classic anthropological accounts, and in more contemporary ethnography, particularly in relation to studies of documents, organizations, policy, development, politics, and science and technology

Introduction: Towards an Ethnography of Meeting (Hannah Brown, Adam Reed & Thomas Yarrow) 1. Contradiction in Contemporary Political Life (Simone Abram) 2. Demonstrating Development: Meetings as Management in Kenya’s Health Sector (Hannah Brown & Maia Green) 3. The Receding Horizon of Informality in WTO Meetings (Nicholas Lamp) 4. The Meeting as Subjunctive Form (Catherine Alexander) 5. Where Knowledge Meets: Heritage Expertise at the Intersection of People, Perspective and Place (Thomas Yarrow) 6. Political Exhaustion and the Experiment of Street (Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella) 7. Minutes, Meetings and ‘Modes of Existence’: Navigating the Bureaucratic process of urban regeneration in East London (Gillian Evans) 8. Ideological Twinning: Socialist Aesthetics and Political Meetings in Maputo, Mozambique (Morten Nielsen) 9. Ethics in Rehearsal (Bernard Keenan & Alain Pottage) 10. An Office of Ethics: Meetings, Roles and Moral Enthusiasm in Animal Protection (Adam Reed) 11. Outputs (Annelise Riles) Afterword (Marilyn Strathern) Index