Franz Boas Seminars FALL 2009
Revised 10/1/09
RICHARD PARKER
Professor
of Sociomedical Sciences
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
When: Wednesday,
October 28, 2009
Time: 4:10pm
Where: Room
963 Schermerhorn Extension
Topic: "Solidarity,
Citizenship and the Ambivalence of an Activist
State:
The Politics of HIV and AIDS in Brazil"
THOMAS HANSEN
Professor of Anthropology
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Amsterdam
When: Wednesday,
November 18,
2009
Time: 4:10pm
Where: Room
963 Schermerhorn Extension
Topic: "The state of the ordinary. Moral
tangles after apartheid."
Notions of
‘the everyday’ and ordinary life have today replaced ‘culture’ as the proper
place from where anthropology constructs its disciplinary perspective. Yet, the
epistemological status and the political history of these concepts are by and
large left unexamined. It is often overlooked that everyday practices also
constituted the preferred site of robust forms of colonial regulation and
bio-politics among subjects deemed to beyond systematic persuasion. Nowhere was
this clearer than in the case of the apartheid state which molded and
reconfigured a vast array of ordinary micro-practices along racially defined
lines. As a result, the status of ordinary life in South Africa is today deeply ambivalent,
morally contested and the site of much worry and embarrassment. The paper will
question the attribution of heroic and organic qualities to the everyday and to
ordinary and will illustrate ethnographically how radical self-doubt pervades
life and imagination in a large urban township.
*Receptions
follow in room 465 Schermerhorn Extension
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