Montag, 09. November 2015, 18:00 - 20:00 iCal
10th Eric Wolf Lecture in Anthropology-Gavin Smith
Elusive Relations: Distant, Intimate, and Hostile
Sky Lounge
Oskar-Morgensternplatz 1, Dachgeschoss, 1090 Wien
Lecture
Changes in the dominant form of capitalism have implicated the shape of the state and supra-state. As a result crucial economic and political relations have to be rethought and methods found for that task. The lecture takes up this challenge for the reformulation of ethnography.
The 2008 economic crisis followed by people’s disenchantment with governments exposed the extent of economic polarity and inequalities of power. Yet the complexities of the instruments of finance and the obscurity of the technologies of power provide a challenge to intellectuals wishing to contribute to public understanding and effective politics for ordinary people. This challenge has been met by a flourishing literature explaining the instruments for garnering value and the mechanisms for securing power. While these help us understand current realities, they say little about the relation between the instruments and mechanisms they explain, and the ordinary people affected by their operation. Relations between the dominant and the dominated as well as relations among the latter are neglected. Taking the work of the late Eric Wolf as exemplary, the lecture seeks to redress this imbalance, by revealing the often obscure complexities of class relations hidden along the ‘pathways of power’.
Focusing on the interfaces of differently scaled social relations Gavin Smith’s ethnographic work in South America and Western Europe has focused on the connection between the ways in which people make a livelihood and their forms of political expression. To this end his ethnographic work relies heavily on seeing the present as a moment in history and hence seeking to address that history as real not simply constructed, a perspective captured in the term historical realism. He has worked on large and small-scale agriculture and urban informal economies in South America, as well as on recent forms of flexible labour organization and regional economies in Europe. His works include Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (1989); Confronting the Present: Towards a Politically Engaged Anthropology (1999); with Susana Narotzky, Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain (2006), and Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism (2014)
Zur Webseite der Veranstaltung
Veranstalter
Kontakt
Mag. Marie-Therese Hartwig
Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie
427749534
marie-therese.hartwig@univie.ac.at
Erstellt am Dienstag, 10. November 2015, 09:55
Letzte Änderung am Mittwoch, 11. November 2015, 07:55