Anthropology Seminar Series 2018-19
Thursdays, 4:00 pm, Anthropology Seminar Room, Rh2.20 Rowan House (upper floor)
Click on the tabs below to view details about each seminar.
CANCELLED 11th October 2018, Maria Erikson Baaz, Gothenburg University, Sweden
"The Women Peace and Security Research and Policy Agenda: The Politics of 'Desirable Truths"
Prof. Maria Erikson Baaz
Professor in Peac & Development Research
Gothenburg Univerisity, Sweden
4.00-5.30pm
RH2.20 Anthropology Seminar Room, Rowan House
Maynooth University
8th November 2018, Ann Kingsolver, University of Kentucky
'American made? U.S. Economic Nationalism's Practical Impossibility’
Professor Ann Kingsolver
University of Kentucky
4.00-5.30pm
RH2.20 Anthropology Seminar Room, Rowan House, Maynooth University
22nd November 2018, Alice Wilson, University of Sussex
"Defeated Veterans, Lasting Values, Counter-Hegemony and Former Revolutionaries in Souther Oman"
Alice Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology
University of Sussex
4.00-5.30pm
RH2.20 Anthropology Seminar Room, Rowan House
Maynooth University
29th November 2018, Maria Dabringer, University of Vienna [Creole Teacher Exchange]
Dr Maria Dabringer
University of Vienna
4.00-5.30pm
RH2.20 Anthropology Seminar Room, Rowan House,
Maynooth University
6th December 2018, Moira Ni Mordhu, Maynooth University
'Everyday Politics in the Lives of NGO Workers in Senegal'
Dr Moira Ni Mordhu, Maynooth University
4.00-5.30pm
RH2.20 Anthropology Seminar Room, Rowan House
Maynooth Universit
7th February 2019, James Laidlaw, Cambridge University
'The Virtue of Reality'
Professor James Laidlaw
Cambridge University
Philosophers have recognised a problem in the understanding of virtue that goes all the way back to Aristotle, the so-called ‘priority problem’. If acting virtuously is defined as acting of the basis of a virtuous disposition (it is not virtuous if you do the right thing by mistake or in order to seem virtuous, for example) then what is the relation between disposition and action? Are properly performed virtuous actions the precondition for acquiring virtuous dispositions, or is having a good disposition a prerequisite for performing such actions? This paper suggests that if we look to the anthropology of ritual, we can find ways of thinking our way out of this problem, and that doing so also illuminates why projects of ethical self-cultivation and ethical pedagogy so often have recourse, but also an ambivalent attitude, to ritual practice.
4.00-5.30pm
RH2.20 Anthropology Seminar Room, Rowan House
Maynooth University
21st February, Catriona Macauley, Ayrshire Council
'Design in Government: Experiences, Opportunities, Challenges'
Dr Catriona Macaulay, Chief Designer, The Scottish Government.
3-4.30pm on Thursday 21st February 2019
Location: John Hume Lecture Theatre 3
7th March 2019, Mark Whitaker, University of Kentucky
“They get more miracles than us!” Negotiating identity boundaries at postwar Sri Lankan multi-religious ritual sites
Professor Mark Whitaker
University of Kentucky
Despite a sometimes violent, post-colonial history of inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflict Sri Lanka continues to have ritual sites such as, most famously, Sri Pada and Kateragama, where people of various religious and ethnic identities mingle. Moreover, though some sites have been the focus of efforts, primarily though not exclusively by the state, to impose narrative and identity homogenization, other sites, invigorated by post war circumstances, such as Our Lady of Madhu Shrine in Mannar, attract ever larger, ethnically and religiously mixed, crowds. In this paper, based on research conducted in Colombo, Kandy, Mannar, Jaffna and Batticaloa in 2018, the very notion of ‘identity boundaries’ will be examined in light of the complex dance of identity recognition, reaction, and strategic ignorance practiced by devotees at Sri Lanka’s multi-religious sites. Ultimately, standard notions of tolerance and intolerance also will be re-examined and, perhaps, multiplied.
14th March 2019, Janine Wedel, George Mason University
"From Warsaw to Washington: How Communist Experience Elucidates Dangers to Western Democracies Today"
Professor Janine Wedel
Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University
2nd May 2019, Brackette Williams, University of Arizona
Black at the Bone: A Semaphore Language for Assessing Moral Order
Professor Brackette Williams
University of Arizona
Thursday 2nd May
4.00pm Anthropology Seminar Room
Black at the Bone: A Semaphore Language for Assessing Moral Order
Guinier and Torres (2002) treated the miner’s canary as a metaphor for political race and, earlier, Copeland (1939) had investigated Negro as a moral contrast conception. Building on these insights, I argue that within the Atlantic World and its circuits of influence, race-as-blackness-descended-from-slavery-indentureship-conquest is a syncategorematic in semaphore language by which the social order’s morality is assessed. The signs, signals, symbols, and metaphors of this language shape practices that legitimate a mode of production that converts suffering and degradations and its conditions of existence into capital. This means of individual capital accumulation sets conditions for the genesis of criteria by which individuals, ideally if not actually, are subjected to sufficient degradation to produce units of the moral substance known as character. Intergenerationally, individual character-building becomes the primitive accumulation of culture; taken as the moral quality of primary and secondary units to which individuals belong or with which they identify. The semaphore language, allows of us speak the moral implication of a seemingly unbreakable syncategorematic: race-as-moral-blackness-descended-from-slavery-indentureship-and-conquest, race-as-blackness-descended-from-degradation. Degradation by slavery, indentureship, and conquest produces the core symbol—made morally black at the bone—which is made meaningful only when contrasted with other beings spawned by the bottom of the well.
As the exemplar for worst conditions under which individual character-building occurs, the slavery and colonialism mode of production creates the units of morality central to the conversion of degraded labor into demerit. By individual fortitude, demerit becomes merit and the individual’s contribution to identity group moral capital. Thus, heirs to the exemplar have a vested interest in defending its salience against competing modes of degradation. I suggest that policing by heirs is overwhelmed by that of activist reformers also operating under conditions derived from the simultaneous salience of an estate-based precept, the Principle of Least [Less] Eligibility (LEP). Calls on the syncategorematic exemplar combine with the strictures of LEP to reduce reform policy, first, to classification schemes that legalize eligibility criteria for the binary worthy/unworthy and, second, to legitimate limiting service populations by reading this binary as deserving/undeserving. Like many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery abolitionists, these practices allow present-day reformers try to gain control over the historicity of the social order so they may declare when it is advancing or declining as a moral order.