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.

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the November instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Dr Cameo Dalley of Melbourne. The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 9 November
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood C2.05, Deakin Downtown, and VMP 39384)

Encounters in the Death Space: Cattle, Aboriginal Capitalism and Organisations in Remote Northern Australia

This article draws on research undertaken in a remote Aboriginal pastoral station in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia to explore the encounters and after-effects of the arrival of a new form of expansive Aboriginal capitalism. The gloss of the neoliberal capitalist ideal is the empowerment of a small group of emplaced but hypermarginal Aboriginal people, through the provision of capacity and resources by a more powerful Aboriginal organisation. However, the promise of empowerment hides the predatory nature of the encounter and the lateral structural violence that it entails. This violence is propelled by what Amit (2012) has called ‘exceptional disjunctures’, which here I take to be moments that punctuate the social fabric of pre-existing forms of indigeneity. Here the ‘death space’, to borrow Taussig’s (1987) notion, is not occupied by the colonial settler-state, but rather by Aboriginal people and Aboriginal organisations themselves. The impacts of encounters in this space are compound in that they involve the wresting of land, and the control of commodities (cattle) away from a small group of people who have had their tradition-derived rights recognised by the settler-state through successive legal processes. What is at risk in these encounters then is the expansion of hypermarginality via the diminishment of claims to particularised forms of indigenous identity.

Biography

Dr Cameo Dalley is a McArthur Postdoctoral Fellow in anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her current research project has investigated the multiple realms in which kardiya and Ngarinyin Aboriginal belonging is manifest in the Kimberley region. She has published on topics of identity, indigeneity and the intercultural and her most recent publication examines education-driven mobility for Indigenous youth http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9830-9780824867966.aspx. 

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the October instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Dr Eve Vincent of Macquarie University. The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 12 October
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood C2.05, Deakin Downtown, and VMP 39384)

‘The politics of disgust, suffering and compassion in an outback Australian town’

This seminar takes account of two developments that both constitute ‘experimental interventions’ into Aboriginal lives in the rural South Australian town of Ceduna. First, between 2008-2016, the local council engaged a private security firm to essentially remove from view the socially aberrant otherness of Aboriginal public drinkers: guard dogs were used to enforce local by-laws, which are seen to enshrine ‘civilised’ norms. Disgust animated the local debate surrounding this experiment, foul matter—rubbish and shit—and ‘foul language’ assuming prominence in discourses justifying the dogs’ introduction and retention. Second, in 2015, Ceduna was selected as the first trial site for the cashless welfare card, the latest iteration of Australia’sracialised experiments in welfare reform. Public debate surrounding the controversial federal government’s trial’s beginnings saw discourses shift from the politics of disgust to the politics of suffering and compassion. These case studies are analysed together using Didier Fassin’s term, ‘biolegitimacy’, which emphasises the ‘construction of the meaning and values of life instead of [focussing exclusively on] the exercise of forces and strategies [used] to control it’ (2009: 52). Tracking then between the state’s neglect and ‘abandonment’ of Indigenous lives (Povinelli 2011), and the terms in which care and concern are expressed for these same lives, I seek to grasp both the governance of life and some sense of the value marginalised social actors attach to their particular lives, in the process glimpsing something of ‘their practice of politics’ (Fassin 2009: 57).

References: Fassin, D. (2009). Another Politics of Life is Possible. Theory Culture Society 26(5): 44-60; Povinelli, E. (2011). Economies of Abandonment. Durham: Duke University Press.

Biography

Dr Eve Vincent is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University. She is the author of ‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2017) and co-editor of Unstable Relations: Environmentalism and Indigenous People in Contemporary Australia (UWAP, 2016).

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the September instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, 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.

(Please note: our previously-scheduled seminar by Victoria Stead has been cancelled due to unforseen circumstances. The date and time remain unchanged, however.)

Date: Thursday 7 September
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

(Also, by videoconference, at Deakin Burwood C2.05, Deakin Downtown, and VMP 39384)

“The State will have no religion”: Secular Crises, Conversion and Reconversion in India and Sri Lanka.

Exploring the current controversies in India surrounding freedom of choice and religious conversion, specifically the so-called reconversion or ‘homecoming’ (gharwapsi) campaign being promoted by Hindutva groups, the paper explores a range of debates about secularism and the contemporary Indian state. Through a comparison with similar and closely articulated debates concerning Buddhism, conversion and state religion in Sri Lanka, the paper argues for a revision of the doctrine of secularism as well as the doctrine of postsecularism in both countries through a critique of the popular postcolonial assertion that secularism is a modern concept foreign to the region. 

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.

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the August instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Akhil Gupta (UCLA, University of Melbourne). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 3 August
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

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

The Many Futures of Global Capitalism

In academic literature as much as in popular culture, call centres have set off enormous debates about the outsourcing of service sector jobs in a global economy. While we engage the political economic consequences of labour arbitrage, our primary focus is on the interplay of affective labour, futurity, and informatics to understand the sociocultural implications of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). We propose that the proliferation of disjunctive temporalities is key to understanding this interplay in the contemporary conjuncture of global capitalism. Since the opening of the first call centre in 1999, the BPO industry has grown rapidly to employ about 700,000 people with gross revenues of US $26 billion in 2015. Based on long-term and diachronic fieldwork with workers in three different companies in Bangalore, our objective in this project is to ethnographically examine the futurities spawned by intertwined processes of rapid transformation and stagnation, aspiration and anxiety, upward social mobility and precarity—in short, the disjunctive temporalities undergirding India’s “New Economy.”

Biography

Akhil Gupta is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for India and South Asia at  the University of California Los Angeles. His work explores themes of transnational capitalism, postcoloniality, globalisation, infrastructure, and corruption. His field research interrogates anthropological and social theory from its margins, by paying attention to the experience of peasants and other groups of poor people in India. He is the author of, among other things, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke University Press 1998) and Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Duke University Press 2012), and has edited, among other things, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science with James Ferguson (University of California Press 1997) and The Indian State After Liberalization, with Kalyanakrishnan Shivaramakrishnan (Routledge 2010). He is currently doing a long-term research field project on call centers in Bangalore.

Some of you may be keen to note, a PhD scholarship is now available in Deakin’s Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Education. The PhD student will initiate and conduct research associated with the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC ‘Hazards, culture and Indigenous communities’ project led by Dr Timothy Neale and Dr Jessica K. Weir.

The project team is looking for applicants from the relevant social sciences Anthropology, History, and Geography to conduct an affiliated doctoral research project under the supervision of Dr Timothy Neale. The proposed doctoral project must align with the focus of the project, and at least one of its objectives, as well as with the aims of the BNHCRC more generally. 

This scholarship is currently only open to domestic candidates (domestic includes candidates with Australian Citizenship, Australian Permanent Resident, New Zealand Citizenship). Qualified international candidate should contact Dr Neale for further details. If you wish to discuss your research interests and project proposal before applying, please contact Dr. Neale via email <[email protected]>

More information at: http://www.deakin.edu.au/courses/scholarships/find-a-scholarship/hdr-scholarship-cultural-hazards

Friends, colleagues, please join us for the July instalment of our Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series 2017, presented by Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University, visiting scholar, University of Melbourne). The seminar will be followed by drinks at The Edge, 6/8 Eastern Beach Rd, Geelong.

Date: Thursday 20th July
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Location: Deakin Waterfront AD1.122

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

The Power of Illumination

As Sean Cubitt asserts, illumination is the focus of ‘an evolving set of meanings negotiated between scientists, engineers, manufacturers, marketers, architects, interior decorators, urbanists and their business and domestic customers’ (2013: 312) as cultural and historical contexts change, mutate and adapt. In considering how practices of illumination are entangled with power, this seminar draws on conceptions  advanced by Foucault, Marx, Bourdieu and Rancière. Firstly, it will explore how lighting is used in the surveillance, policing and control of bodies. Secondly, it looks at how lighting inscribes inequalities across space. Thirdly, it discusses how cultural capital is mobilized to assert judgements around aesthetic value and taste. And fourthly, it examines how the normative arrangements through which we apprehend everyday illuminated space are forged by those who have the power to distribute the sensible.

The Call for Papers is now open for the Inaugural Oceania Ethnography and Education Network (OEEN) Conference. Deakin’s Dr Jessica Walton (Alfred Deakin Institute) is convening this conference with A/Prof Martin Forsey (UWA). This conference is funded by the Australian Research Council and will be held at Deakin Downtown (24-25 August 2017). You can find the CFP and more information about joining OEEN here.