Mittwoch, 07. Dezember 2016, 17:00 - 18:30 iCal

Wednesday Seminar

Filipe Calvão: Diviners and Detectives: Secrecy and Surveillance in Colonial and Socialist Angola

Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie; Hörsaal C
Universitätsstraße 7 (NIG); 4. Stock, 1010 Wien

Vortrag


The bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and security intelligence constitutes a publicly acknowledged secret, feared as much as it remains concealed. In this presentation, I historicize the drift between revealing the unseen and communicating information deemed secret in Angola. Tracing the relation between control and hiddenness in the work of diviners and detectives, I describe an ordinary event of divination in the 1950s and the revelation of a widespread network of illegal trafficking by the post-independence Angolan state in the 1980s. Moving from Angola’s colonial to a socialist regime of security, the presentation reveals the alignment between ritual, corporate and state “occult” knowledge as practices of control and surveillance. By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the ‘occult’ apparatus of corporate and state surveillance, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production came to erode or shore up colonial and post-colonial rule.

 

Filipe Calvão (PhD, University of Chicago) is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. I have a decade-long commitment to the ethnographic study of extractive economies in postcolonial Africa, with a focus in Angola (2006-2015). Broadly conceived, my work speaks to contemporary debates on corporate and state institutions, and the political economy and ecology of mineral extraction. Since 2013, I have extended my original ethnography of everyday life inside a postcolonial diamond mine to include the problem of transparency and ethical sourcing, based in international diamond markets in Switzerland. I am currently finishing a book manuscript based on this research, where I examine the life of mining communities engrained in a secretive system of social, legal, and power relations, from the sourcing of gemstones to the quotidian surveillance of workers.

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Veranstalter

Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie


Kontakt

Tabitha Schnoeller
Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie
49502
tabitha.schnoeller@univie.ac.at