Brown Bag Seminar With Elizabeth Povinelli
Wednesday 7 December 2011
On December 7th, 2011, the Anthropology and Sociology Department of IHEID hosted Professor Elizabeth Povinelli. Students and faculty had the honor to participate in an intimate Brown Bag Workshop, exploring Povinelli’s latest book, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011). The work is, in the Professor’s own words, “another chapter” of her anthropology of the otherwise – distinguished from anthropologies of the “other” by a pointed interest in the condition of dwelling in threshold phenomena during an era of late liberalism. Threshold phenomena express the potentiality – the space between being and not being – experienced daily by Indigenous communities in Northern Australia, with whom Povinelli has been working over the last 25 years, and constitute her unique understanding of their ways of maneuvering and not being able to maneuver, realizing and not being able to realize their alternative social projects.
Elizabeth Povinelli currently chairs the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies. Before even starting her career as an academic anthropologist, Povinelli worked closely with the Beyluen Community in Northern Australia as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. The land claim struggles undertaken by indigenous communities at the time largely defined the trajectory she would take as an anthropologist and thinker. Among her various ongoing research projects, Povinelli is presently working on digitalizing archives that contain knowledge of indigenous communities in order to assist the latter’s re-appropriation of their own geographically grounded histories. Among her most influential works are The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities (2002) and the Making of Australian and The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality (2006). Professor Povinelli’s upcoming book looks at “dwelling science”.
Although Povinelli started writing at a time when the concept of culture was under intense critique and studying the “self” was emerging as a counter to studying the “other”, Povinelli found the most compelling “self” was a particular threshold rather than an identity. “I wasn’t studying the ‘other’. I never was studying the ‘other’. I was never trying to understand the ‘other’, or myself better, or my or someone else’s culture better.” She was—and was captivated by—a particular experience and kind of threshold in late liberalism, namely, the gap between the liberal politics of difference and the potential otherwises that lie within this politics.
During a follow-up informal interview, Professor Povinelli urged the aspiring anthropologists of IHEID: “find a deep, deep thing that you are mad about and write about it.” Her advice resonates with the Department’s focus on writing critically from below, from the margins and across borders.
Ekateria Nikolova & Zina Sawaf
PhD candidates ANSO
Mrs Ekaterina Frolova (IZFG, University of Bern)
"Women and Politics : a case from Tajikistan"
Thursday 17 November 2011
