Friends, colleagues, please join us for this fourth instalment in the Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Frederic Keck (EHESS, Musée du Quai Branly). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

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

(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)

Biosecurity in museums of virology, ornithology and anthropology

If biosecurity can be defined as a recent paradoxical injunction to circulate living material for the production of knowledge while securing its uses because of the instability of this material, it can help us revisit the history of museums as places where material is stored and conserved for the public display of knowledge. This talk will compare the history of virology since the discovery of the flu virus in the 1930’s, the history of ornithology since the voyages of Captain Cook and the history of anthropology since the foundation of the Museum of Man in Paris. It proposes a genealogy of the current analogies between the management of bird flu at Hong Kong University and the management of non-European artefacts at the musée du quai Branly in Paris.

Biography: 

Frédéric Keck is a researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and Director of the Research Department of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. After studying philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, he has investigated the history of anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions. He published Claude Lévi-Strauss, Une Introduction (Pocket-La découverte, 2005), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Entre Philosophie et Anthropologie (CNRS Editions, 2008) and Un Monde Grippé (Flammarion, 2010). He has co-edited (with N . Vialles) Des Hommes Malades des Animaux (L’ Herne, 2012) and (with A. Lakoff) Sentinel Devices (Limn, 2013).

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the latest seminar in the Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Cris Shore, of the University of Auckland. (See below for a description of Cris’ research.) The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 27th April
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)

Symbiotic or Parasitic? Universities, Academic Capitalism and the Global Knowledge Economy

The health of social anthropology as a discipline has long been connected to its position as a university-based subject. However, changes in the political economy of higher education, including cuts in public spending, rising student fees, the privileging of STEM subjects over the arts and humanities, and the proliferation of new regimes of audit and accountability, pose challenges for social sciences as well as the university itself. In countries such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand, academics are being urged to be more entrepreneurial, to focus on ‘impact’, and to engage proactively with business and finance in order to create a more commercially-oriented ‘innovation ecosystem’. The idea of forging a ‘triple helix’ of university-industry-government relations has become part of the new common sense that now drives government policies for higher education. But how positive is this supposed symbiosis between universities and external financial interests? What are the costs and benefits of this collaboration? And what are the implications for the future of the public university?

Biography: 

Cris Shore is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. His main research interests lie in the interface between anthropology and politics, particularly the Anthropology of Policy, Europe, and the ethnography of organisations. He was founding editor of the journal Anthropology in Action and is a founder member (and co-President) of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy, a Section of the American Anthropological Association. His published work covers a range of issues of anthropological, theoretical and public policy interest including the European Union, the State, elites, corruption, ‘audit culture’ and higher education reform. He currently leads two projects: an EU Centres Network study of the effects of austerity in the Eurozone, and a Royal Society of New Zealand-funded project on ‘The Crown and Constitutional Reform in New Zealand and Other Commonwealth Countries’. His most recent book, co-edited with Susan Wright, is Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Universities in the Knowledge Economy (Oxford: Berghahn Press, 2017).

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the second seminar in the Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Eben Kirksey, of UNSW. (See below for a description of Eben’s research.) The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

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

(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)

 

Lively multispecies communities and deadly racial assemblages in West Papua

Indigenous people from West Papua, a territory under Indonesian rule, are foraging for food in spaces by the side of the road, in the ruins of recently logged forests. Living on the margins of market economies and transportation infrastructures comes with opportunities as well as risks. Emergent ecosystems are teeming with grasshoppers, katydids, praying mantises, and other edible insects, as well as marsupial game animals. Children are finding happiness in the hap of what happens in these multispecies worlds. At the same time, plans by technocrats in distant metropolitan centers to turn nomadic hunter-gatherers into a governable population have gone awry. Infrastructures and modern medical practices protect some people in Indonesia from tropical diseases like malaria, while Papuans die. Black lives matter. But some black lives matter more than others. The case of one black boy who was shot dead along the side of the road in June 2015 while hunting with friends is part of an ongoing process of genocide in West Papua. Race, nationality, and class all help determine who has full personhood before the law. In pursuing the elusive promise of justice in West Papua, indigenous people are pushing back against powerful assemblages and infrastructures, creating the conditions for continued life in multispecies communities. 

 

Biography: 

Eben Kirksey studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history. Duke University Press has published his two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014). Dr Kirksey is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that mixes ethnographic, historical, ethological, and genetic methods to study spaces where humans and other species meet. He has been working in West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, since 1998. Princeton University hosted Dr Kirksey as the 2015-2016 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor and he is currently Senior Lecturer and the Environmental Humanities Convener at UNSW Australia.

Friends, colleagues, we would like to invite you to come along to the first seminar in the Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by our very own David Boarder Giles. (See below for a description of David’s research.) The seminar will be followed by a start-of-the-series drink at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 2nd March
Time: 4:30-6:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also: Burwood C2.05; Melbourne Corporate Center, enquire at desk; VMP 39384)

 

Towards an Anthropology of Abject Economies

Where do things go when they are lost, discarded, or forgotten? What social afterlives do they lead? And perhaps more importantly, whose lives are constituted among the detritus? Through an exploration of such questions, and the larger patterns that emerge from them, I sketch out new directions for an anthropology of value, one that looks beyond the horizons of capital towards the futures that lie in its ruins.

To that end, we will explore what might constitute an abject economy—an economy built precisely on the abjection and abandonment of people, places, and things. What pathways of devalorization and desuetude might be its conditions of possibility? What emergent forms of life endure, for example, in the interstices of capital? What non-market practices and regimes of value are possible within its folds?

Giles develops both a theoretical framework for future research, and an ethnographic description from his own work with dumpster-divers, squatters, and other scavengers in several “global” cities in North America. These scavengers cultivate, in a very real sense, minor economies, putting into circulation those surpluses—people, places, and things alike—discarded by the prevailing markets and publics of these cities. They present us with one model of an abject economy: non-market forms of surplus value and labor, simultaneously made possible and necessary by the vicissitudes of capital accumulation.

These economies are paradoxes, neither separable from, nor commensurable with the logic of market exchange. Such economies hold profound lessons for the anthropology of the twenty-first century—in which market-centric, “neoliberal” regimes of value seem to have eclipsed so many other forms of economy. In a moment when there seems to be no “outside” to capitalism, we may yet discover its margins, and there may we not only learn a great deal about the ontological grounds of capital itself, but also discover existing and emergent modes of valuing otherwise. Giving an account of these dynamics and paradoxes, I will argue, will be one of anthropology’s key challenges in the coming years.

 

Biography

David Boarder Giles is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He writes about cultural economies of waste and homelessness, and the politics of urban food security and public space, particularly in “global” cities. He has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Seattle and other cities in the United States and Australasia with dumpster divers, urban agriculturalists, grassroots activists, homeless residents, and chapters of Food Not Bombs—a globalized movement of grassroots soup kitchens. You can read excerpts of his work at his blog.