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Franz Boas Seminar
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Franz Boas Seminar


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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