Anthropology Speaker Series
Fall 2013
Los Exvotos Pictográficos Guadalupanos: Reglas Tradicionales y Transformaciones Mediáticas
Margarita Zires, Universidad Autónoma de México, Xochimilco, Mexico
Thursday, September 12,
3:00 to 4:00 pm, 688 Sherbrooke West, Room 1041
(co-sponsored with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
and the Latin American and Carribbean Studies Interdisciplinary Program)
Metrics of the Global Sovereign: Numbers and Stories in Global Health
Vincanne Adams, Professor, University of California, San Francisco,
Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine
Wednesday, September 18,
3:30 pm, 3647 Peel Street, Don Bates Seminar Room 101
(co-sponsored with SSOM)
Workshop: Fieldwork After Ethnos
George Marcus, Professor, Department of Anthropology UC Irvine;
Tobias Rees, Assistant Professor SSOM, McGill;
Katherine Lemons, Assistant Professor, Anthropology McGill (discussant)
Wednesday October 2,
9 am- 1 pm, 688 Sherbrooke, room 1041
(co sponsored with SSOM)
Prototyping & Contemporary Anthropological
Experiments with Ethnographic Method
George Marcus, Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine
Thursday Oct. 3, 6-8 pm,
Concordia University, H-1145;
1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd
(co-sponsored with SSOM, Concordia Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
CEREV Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence)
Repatriation and the Second Life of Heritage: Return of the Masks in Kodiak, Alaska
James Clifford, Emeritus Professor in the History of Consciousness
Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Friday, October 11, 5:00-6:30,
Concordia University, VA Building, VA114,
1395 René Levèsque West
(co-sponsored with Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University)
The Great Chinese Grasslands and the Fate of Their Pastoral Peoples.
Philip Salzman, Professor, Department of Anthropology, McGill University
Monday, October 21,
12:30-2:30 pm, Peterson Hall, room 116
The Fog of Humanitarian War: the Indistinguishability of Warriors, Enemies, Victims, and Saviors
Mariella Pandolfi, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal
Monday, November 11,
12:30-2:30 pm, Peterson Hall, room 116
Ethnographic Film Screenings and Q & A with Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab Filmmakers
Lucien Taylor, Professor Anthropology Harvard University;
J.P Sniadecki, Assistant Professor Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University;
Stephanie Spray, Harvard University
November 14-17, RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival (Details TBA)
(co-sponsored with RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival)
Roundtable with Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab Filmmakers
Lucien Taylor, Professor of Visual Arts and Anthropology Harvard University;
J.P Sniadecki, Assistant Professor Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University;
Stephanie Spray, Harvard University;
Lisa Stevenson; Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, McGill (moderator)
November 17 or 18, McGill University (Details TBA)
(co-sponsored with RIDM Montreal International Documentary Festival)
Winter 2014
TBA
Past Speakers: Winter and Spring 2013
Monday talks begin with a light lunch. For queries please contact Professor Kohn at eduardo [dot] kohn [at] mcgill [dot] ca.
Fieldwork in Photography
Dr. Robert Desjarlais, Professor of Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College,
Berkeley CA
Monday, January 14
12:30 to 2:30 pm at Peterson Hall 116
Capitalism after Progress: Salvage Accumulation on Blasted Landscapes
Dr. Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz
Friday, February 1
2 to 4 pm at Concordia University's Hall Building, Room 415, 1455 de Maisonneuve Boulevard West
[co-sponsored with the Department of Anthropology, Concordia University]
What would the world look like if we examined it without expectations of progress? This talk offers a taste from my “Living in Ruins” project, in which a charismatic wild mushroom helps me view the world through disturbed forests and displaced rural people—that is, through humans and nonhumans negotiating progress’s ruins. Capitalism certainly looks different from this perspective. Suddenly it is clear that capitalism can never be self-contained; accumulation is always salvaged for capitalism from non-capitalist social landscapes, including the ruined industrial forests of my mushroom study. How could we have missed this? Without the blinders of progress, the riches of global heterogeneity come into view, both terrible and sweet.
Workshop on Excerpts from Anna Tsing's "Living in Ruins" Manuscript*
Dr. Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa Cruz
Saturday, February 2
10 am to 1 pm at SSOM Room 101, 3647 Peel Street
[co-sponsored with the Department of Anthropology, Concordia University]
*Please note: This event is open to those who have read the pre-circulated manuscript. If you wish to attend please contact eduardo [dot] kohn [at] mcgill [dot] ca (Eduardo Kohn).
Title TBA
Dr. Betsey Brada, Ph.D Anthropology, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Center for Health and Well-Being, Princeton University
Wednesday, February 13
3:30 to 5:00 pm at 3647 Peel Street, Room 101
[co-sponsored with SSOM]
When Law and Social Science Diverge: Causation in the International Law of Incitement to Commit Genocide
Dr. Richard Wilson, Gladstein Professor of Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology and Law, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut
Monday, February 18
12:30 to 2:30 pm at Peterson Hall 116
Debt, Credit and the “End” of Finance in Post-Fukushima Japan
Dr. Hiro Miyazaki, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University
Monday, April 8
12:30 to 2:30 pm at Peterson Hall 116
[co-sponsored with SSOM and the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy]
The ongoing global financial crisis suggests that the era in which finance served as a site of vigorous intellectual and socio-economic experiment may have come to an end. This sense of the end of finance has particularly intensified in Tokyo. Theories, techniques and conceptual tools of finance designed to manage and profit from risk have served as means of socio-economic reform in Japan since the burst of the economic bubble in the early 1990s. Financial market professionals have been a major force behind the promotion of a new culture of risk and responsibility. Following the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, however, Tokyo is quickly losing its status as a global financial center, and Tokyo’s financial market professionals now face new challenges ranging from frequent lay-offs and downsizing to a sheer lack of intellectual excitement.
In this context, Japan’s triple disasters on March 11, 2011, and the profound uncertainty of the world that the disasters have revealed, have presented a new layer of challenges to Tokyo’s financial market professionals. In particular, the accident at Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant created a financial crisis of its own. Its operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), a major supplier of electricity in the greater Tokyo area, was what many perceived as one of the most financially stable companies and was the biggest issuer of corporate bonds in Japan prior to the accident. After the disasters, major Japanese financial institutions, such as mega banks and insurance companies, were suddenly exposed to a wide range of risks associated with TEPCO’s large corporate debt as well as lawsuits and massive compensation claims against the utility company. These risks quickly became major sources of anxiety and profit opportunity for Tokyo’s financial market professionals.
In this paper, drawing on my ethnographic field research in Tokyo in 2011 and 2012, I examine two contrasting market responses to the TEPCO crisis orchestrated by Tokyo’s financial market professionals in the months following the disasters, as manifestations of these professionals’ conscious efforts to re-deploy theories and techniques of finance in a newly found sphere of profound uncertainty. I offer these ethnographic examples as illustrations not only of problems associated with the specificity and peculiarity of Japan’s debt and credit markets but also of a more general question of how theoretical, technical and professional commitments are made anew.
Hirokazu Miyazaki is Director of the East Asia Program and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He has studied indigenous Fijian gift giving and Japanese derivatives trading. He is the author of The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford University Press, 2004) and Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance (University of California Press, 2013).