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).
Past Speakers: Fall 2012
A Material Politics of Distinction: Generic Drugs and their Multiples
Dr. Cori Hayden, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley,
Berkeley CA
Wednesday, September 5
3:30 pm at 3647 Peel Street, Don Bates Seminar Room 101
[co-sponsored with SSOM]
Can rich people’s medicines and poor people’s medicines really be the same? The relatively sudden emergence of generic pharmaceuticals in Mexico's commercial pharmaceutical landscape hasgenerated some vividly material conundra around the sites and sources of pharmaceutical equivalence and difference. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic research in Mexico, this talk examines how regulatory and commercial vernaculars of sameness can simultaneously animate and interruptpolitical imaginations and markets grounded in the idioms of (e)quality, substitution and interchangeability.
From Fischot to Fish It: Outport Archaeology on Newfoundland's French Shore
Dr. Peter E. Pope, Professor of Archaeology, Memorial University, St. Johns, Newfoundland
Monday, September 24
12:30 pm at Peterson Hall 116
[co-sponsored with the French Atlantic History Group]
Although local sponsorship of archaeological research is an unusual model in North America, economic and political realities in Newfoundland mean that archaeology is often driven by the social and economic interests of local communities, as much as by research agendas. Following the collapse of northern cod stocks in the early 1990s, some communities invested archaeology with hopes that went beyond purely academic or cultural resource management considerations. As a response, Memorial University’s Archaeology Unit developed the Newfoundland Archaeological Heritage Outreach Program, in 2000. This presentation will take a look at the impact of NAHOP in northern Newfoundland, where the local French Shore Historical Society has been instrumental in An Archaeology of the Petit Nord, a multi-year project designed to record the maritime cultural landscape of this coastal zone, exploited seasonally by migratory Breton fishing crews between 1508 and 1904.
Los exvotos pictográficos guadalupanos: reglas tradicionales y transformaciones mediáticas*
Dr. Margarita Zires, Universidad Autónoa de México, Xochimilco, Mexico
Thursday, September 27
3:00 to 4:00 pm at 688 Sherbrooke West, Room 1041 (reception to follow in Room 367)
[co-sponsored with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Latin American and Carribbean Studies Interdisciplinary Program (LACS)]
*Lecture will be delivered in Spanish.
Viral Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the YouTube Witness
Dr. Rebecca Stein, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Women's Studies,
Duke University, Durham NC
Monday, November 26
12:30 to 2:30 pm at Peterson Hall 116 (light lunch included!)
[co-sponsored with the Wolfe Chair in Scientific & Technological Literacy]