Guest Speakers

ANSO Colloquium: First Guest Lecture 2013

March, 12 : CV 342 (6-8pm)

Alexandra Ourousoff (Brunel University, London): "The Power of Certainty".

Please find the abstract here.

Public Lecture: Claudio Costa Pienheiro - recorded

18 December 2012

"Transits & Transitivity: Receptions of the Dependency Theory in Southeast Asia and other dialogues between intellectual peripheries of the Global South"

4:00pm to 6:00pm, at CV342 - 3rd Floor - Voie-Creuse. [More...]

Please find his recorded presentation as audible audio file here as well as his talks' abstract and bio here.

Guest Lecture: J. and J. Comaroff (Harvard University)

10.October 2012

Theory from the South: A discussion with Jean and John Comaroff.

The Institute and the Departement of ANSO welcomed the Oppenheimer fellows and professors at the Department of African and American Studies and of Anthropology, Harvard University, Jean and John Comaroff. Their latest book "Theory from the South: Or, How Europe is Evolving toward Africa" (2011) issues the Eurocentrism of social theory that generalizes on science, law, religion, democracy, neoliberalism or individualism/personhood based on the historical and contemporary experiences of Western societies. The provocative question they raise is: What if we theorize from another location, from Africa, for example, which can be seen not only as the laboratory of Western colonial modernity but whose current precarious economic development, growing social inequality, corrupt governance and weakened states may also reflect the future of Euro-America?

Please find recordings of their lecture below (open as external links):

              Introduction (13:15)

            Conference (48:42)

            Questions (60:02)

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

Brown Bag Seminar with Uprenda Baxi:

27 October 2011: 14h15, Room 342 (Voie Creuse)

"Reinventing Human Rights in an Era of Hyperglobalization: A Few Wayside Remarks"

Prof. Baxi, currently Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study: Law as Culture, University of Bonn, is one of the foremost legal scholars, jurists, critical thinkers and social activists belonging to the Global South. Generations of lawyers, human rights activists and scholars have been significantly influenced by his work not only in his native India but all over the world. In his scholarship Prof. Baxi has made crucial contributions that have not only shaped the theoretical debates concerning human rights but also its practice, thus seamlessly bridging fundamental divides and generating new paradigms.