DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
SPEAKER SERIES 2009/1010
THEORY ETHNOGRAPHY POLITICS
This year’s speaker series focuses on the relationship between theory, ethnography and politics in cultural anthropology today. How to think these contested terms in a world of rupture, of emergent sociality, of ongoing crisis, of unending warfare, of vast poverty alongside unparalleled wealth, of neoliberalization and the waning of old sovereignties? How can ethnographic practice remain responsible to its subjects as well as to the theoretical imperatives of the discipline? What of the political at a time when politics can no longer be located in many of the standard gestures or usual places? In short, how do we critically reassess, politically engage, and creatively enact the anthropological enterprise today?
Monday afternoons 1:30 – 3:00, 225 Friedl Building
FALL
- Sept 7th: Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, Department of Anthropology
“Crypto-colonial Intimacies: Everyday Refractions of Geopolitics in
Greece And Thailand” (click on title to access article)
- Sept. 28th Engseng Ho, Duke University, Depts of Anthropology & History
“Ballots for Bombs: War Beyond Sovereignty, Peace
Beyond Representation” (click on title to access article)
- October 12th Joseph Gone, University of Michigan, Dept of Anthropology
“So I Can Be Like a Whiteman’: The Cultural Psychology of Space and
Place in American Indian Mental Health” (click on title to access article)
SPRING
- Jan 25th: Christopher Kelty, UCLA, Dept of Anthropology
“Safe New Things: A Story of Nanotechnology”
- February 22nd: Kath Weston, University of Virginia, Depts of Anthropology & Women’s Studies
“Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor”
- March 1st: Jessica Cattelino, UCLA, Dept of Anthropology
“Seminole Territoriality and “Getting the Water Right” in the Florida
Everglades”