Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series #1: Rohan Bastin, ‘An Obscure Desire for Catastrophe: The Moral Anthropology Turn’

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the very first instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2018, presented by our very own Dr Rohan Bastin (Division of Anthropology, Deakin University). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

 

Date: Thursday 1 March
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood F2.009, Deakin Downtown, and VMP ARTSED SHSS 39354)

 

An Obscure Desire for Catastrophe: The Moral Anthropology Turn

 

This paper addresses the relation between the so-called rise of moral anthropology and neoliberal economy broadly defined as an economic ideology where the free market is ostensibly circumscribed by apparatuses of self-surveillance and control. It does so by addressing an essay by Badiou on economy and morality, Lazzarato on indebtedness and morality, and also Nietzsche’s concepts of slave morality and ressentiment. Bouncing off a remark by Fassin on what he sees as the humanist turn in anthropology, which he argues is a profound evolution in the discipline, the paper argues that moral anthropology of this kind is largely novel in its self-representation and with that its awareness of its situation and its past. By tying these developments to the moralism of debt and the thoroughgoing economism of much recent scholarship, the paper also raises questions about other contemporary concepts including the Anthropocene, the assemblage and the ‘post-human’. It asks whether the spread of economy and the morality of necessity are unavoidable elements for contemporary anthropology or essential badges of participation and survival, elements of the brand, in the contemporary academy and its debt/control society.

 

Biography

Rohan Bastin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University. He leads a project that proposes comparative research on socio-religious reform movements in Sri Lanka, exploring four separate yet related research foci in the post-war context involving each of the major world religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam). It explores questions of human equality and social cohesion in the setting of post-conflict national reconstruction.

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