Social Anthropology seminar series

Spring 2024

Wednesdays 11.00am - 1.00pm | W3.05, IOE, 20 Bedford Way (Note – not in DFSR)

10 January
Panel on Anthropologies of Extortion (ERC Project) with PI Lucia Michelutti (UCL) and project members Julia Sauma (Goldsmiths), Ash Hoque (IoE UCL), Kate Saunders-Hasting (Institute of the Americas, UCL), Yathukulan Yogarajah (UCL) and Miranda Sheild Johansson (UCL)

Extortion has come to occupy a quintessential position in the global imaginary of mafia-type-criminal organizations. Yet it is also increasingly present beyond clandestine criminal networks and is becoming a normalised profitable source of livelihood and governance and a key visible social relation in many parts of the world. The project ‘Anthropologies of Extortion’ researches the apparent expansion and rountinisation of extortion in everyday life. The project sets up extortion as an object of anthropological inquiry and charts the first comprehensive cross-cultural account of extortion in social life across South and East Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe. This panel will include presentation on ongoing work from a selection of project members.

17 January – Chika Watanabe (University of Manchester)
“Improvising the Future: Disaster Preparedness through Play in Japan and Chile”

Millions of people around the world have experienced earthquakes, floods, and fires in the past. Many more of us will face environmental collapse in the future. But disasters are difficult to think with, experiences and prospects we would rather not face. Disaster management staff in municipal offices, nongovernmental organizations working on disaster risk reduction (DRR), and neighbourhood leaders—people I call “preparedness educators”—are devising diverse techniques to make disasters thinkable and, accordingly, make preparedness doable. The story I tell is of preparedness educators in Japan and Chile who are responding to our current time of crisis and looming catastrophe with a sense of fun. They sidestep the tone of urgency and fear; instead, they emphasize play. Turning a playful eye on the world around them, preparedness educators promote improvisation (kufū in Japanese), a resourcefulness grounded in everyday life that repurposes things—mundane objects into resources for future survival, future disasters into fun scenarios in the present, and community events into disaster preparedness. Engaging with theories of play and repair, in this paper I explore preparedness educators’ labour of “improvising the future” to understand a form of readiness for future disasters that burrows itself in ordinary life. This work of improvisation gives us insights into how people do and could engage with disasters in a key other than urgency, anxiety, and doom.

24 January – Laura Rival (University of Oxford)
“Modelling relations with plants in native Amazonia”

The paper raises questions about the status of ethnoscience in ‘decolonising’ knowledge. What forms of collaboration, I ask, will ensure that diverse science makes for better science? Although we have been aware for at least 70 years of the intricate mingling and mirroring effects between models of/ for/ with the human social and models of/ for/ with the non-human natural, we are still struggling to come up with an anthropology which would truly capture human attempts to model their place in the world in all their diversity. Passions recently aroused by the possibilities of plant intelligence are a case in point. There is now a good range of plant/ people ethnographies for the Amazon region, as well as stimulating comparative and analytical propositions that seek to conciliate the ‘plant turn’ with the ‘ontological turn.’  In this context, the paper raises questions about the status of ethnoscience in ‘decolonising’ knowledge. As we seek solutions to our ‘Anthropocenic’ predicament, we take the standpoint that scientific knowledge should evolve in ways that strengthen democratisation and diversity worldwide. Guided by the proposition that the best way to decolonise knowledge is to pluralise science, I discuss on-going collaborative work with Indigenous and decolonial scholars. Here are some of the questions we are grappling with: What ethnographies best describe what happens when knowledge projects meet? What epistemic shifts contribute to sustainability, resilience, or just transition paths? How can we move from false universalisms rooted in imperial approaches to the world to explanatory frameworks grounded in biophysical realities, yet open to a diversity of methods and theoretical orientations?

31 January – Yazan Doughan (LSE)
“Intentions Reconsidered: Reasons for action in the ruins of practical reason”

This paper analyses the personal and collective transformation that patriotic activists in a poor, tribal neighbourhood of Amman, Jordan, during the Arab Spring, from ‘loyalism’ to ‘oppositional activism,’ as they came to understand their political existence through the concept of karāmeh (dignity). I focus on the role played by salient stereotyped figurations in mediating this transformation, not only in social interactions, but more importantly, in forms of moral reasoning and self-narration. I argue that the activists understood what they did, and what ought to be done, not in relation to a fixed set of concepts and referents, but within constantly shifting axes of differentiation between co-constitutive stereotyped figurations. Part of the story of ethical self-transformation I give is a story of how the meaning of patriotism has shifted during the protests. Within shifting axes of differentiation of what is patriotic and what is not, being a patriot is always a process of becoming a patriot – a transformation, but also a continuity. In this interplay of continuity and change in living out a practical identity, reasons for action gain a particular significance in the articulation of intentions and hence in the ability to narrate a personal biography. Beyond the ethnographic case, the larger aim of my talk is to draw some broader conclusions regarding the anthropological study of intentions. I urge that intentions should not be understood as a general dimension of all individual and collective human behaviour, nor a property of ‘mind,’ but rather as a dimension of meaningful action as grounded in what Wittgenstein called language games.

7 February – Johanna Perez
“Sorcery for the Troops: Supernatural bulletproof men inside the Colombian Paramilitary”

This talk examines stories about cruzados: individuals who used sorcery to become bulletproof. During the 1990s and 2000s, such magic was popular among paramilitary combatants in Colombia's Eastern Plains. Drawing on conversations with ex-combatants and testimonials in the press and other documents, it focuses on the stories and references to cruzados circulating within the paramilitary groups. The material is part of my doctoral thesis, which is based on 13 months of fieldwork in a former paramilitary stronghold. The paper provides an overview of one of the thesis' primary themes: the ways in which cruzados reveal the ‘inhumane’ essence of these unstable organisations that survive and spread precisely through the sorcerous operation of transforming human bodies into weapons of war.

21 February – Will Rollason (Brunel University London)
“The wrong world? Realities and their limits in the Air France 447 disaster”

In this paper I think through the accident to Air France Flight 447 on June 1st, 2009, in terms of the production of ‘realities’ of wildly different size and duration. I focus on three sites of reality-making: the pilots, who stalled the aeroplane by commanding a climb even when alarms told them not to; the aircraft systems, which had only intermittent access to good data during the accident sequence; and the investigators, who parse the traces of the crash to produce it as an actionable event that no-one experienced. This case, I suggest, lets us think about the limits of realities in space-times that appear to exist independently of them.

28 February – Gurminder Bhambra (University of Sussex)
“Varieties of Empire, Varieties of Colonialism”

Nations and empires tend to be understood as distinct political entities. This fails to recognise the conjunction of the emergence of the nation-state with European colonial expansion. In this talk, I set out an alternative account of how we might understand the modern state by better understanding the varieties of empire and varieties of colonialism with which it is associated. I shall argue that colonialism is a distinctly modern phenomenon and, in turn, gives European overseas empires a character different from other empires. This difference rests, in large part, in the specificity of a political economy of colonialism that is often misidentified as a separate capitalist modernity.

6 March – Méadhbh McIvor (University of Manchester)
““Whiteness is Not an Ancestor but a Legacy”: Rhetorics of Responsibility and Racial Justice in US Unitarian Universalism”

Much recent scholarship on US-American white-majority religion has focused on the relationship between evangelical Protestantism and white supremacy. Indeed, the rise of (and media focus on) Christian nationalism means conservative Christianity is increasingly presented as the quintessential form of European-American religion. While these studies have cast important light on the political theology of racism and white supremacy, less attention has been paid to the role of anti-racist theology among communities that are both primarily white and explicitly committed to the pursuit of racial justice. Unitarian Universalism—a self-described liberal religious movement built around “the free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” which has roots in various Protestant denominations—is one such tradition. Based on fieldwork with Unitarian Universalists in Arizona, USA, this paper provides an ethnographic account of efforts to recognise and counter white supremacy within a religious space that remains overwhelmingly (and, for some congregants, uncomfortably) white. Drawing on the anthropology of morality and “the good,” I focus on white-identified Unitarian Universalists’ mobilisation of theological resources in their efforts to both take responsibility for and construct an ethnic identity “beyond” whiteness. By exploring the tensions inherent in a project that seeks to acknowledge whiteness without affirming it, I show how these practices function to maintain the centrality of race to the construction of “American religion”—not least, I argue, for communities engaged in the reappraisal and reimagining of their genetic and religious ancestry.

13 March – Aeron O’Connor (UCL)
“Domesticating the Intellectual: Intimate and intellectual lives in times of turmoil”

As Central Asia has lived through and participated in the radical socio-political transformations that socialism and its collapse brought over the last hundred years, this paper engages critically with the lives of public intellectuals whose families have endured, against the odds, as culturally and socially influential figures through this period. While many intellectual histories typically focus on the often male-dominated, public-facing lives of cultural producers, this paper’s intervention is to argue that at the heart of intellectual histories are family ones. Directly linking kinship to knowledge production, this paper shows how ordinary, everyday family life plays a major role in shaping, sustaining and safeguarding intellectuals’ lives through decades of radical societal upheaval and even persecution.

Autumn 2023

Wednesdays 11.00am - 1.00pm | 14 Taviton Street, Daryll Forde Seminar Room | In-person

4 October - Mareike Winchell (London School of Economics)
"Ghostly Invasions: Fire and Anti-Indigenous Environmentalism in Bolivia"

11 October - Lee Douglas (Goldsmiths)
"Memory, Ecology and Amateur Film: (Counter) Archives and the Everyday in Portuguese Film Archives"

18 October - Rebecca Pollack (Foundation for International Education)
"Who is a Good Immigrant? Putting the New Holocaust Memorial in Context" - please note this seminar is for UCL staff and students only

25 October - Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic (University of Glasgow)
"Malware of History:  Memorials and Encryptions of Historical Violence in Vojvodina, Serbia"
N.B. The talk will mention historical killings and disposal of corpses and show one image of dead bodies on the snow from some distance. 

1 November - Marina Sapritsky (UCL)
"Identity shifts and fissures in interpersonal and communal relations:  Jewish responses to Russia’s war in Ukraine"

Spring 2023

In person, Daryll Forde Seminar Room, UCL Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, WC1H 0BW

Convenors: Matthew Doyle and Miranda Sheild Johansson

11 January - Panel Debate Chaired by Alison Macdonald (UCL)
Re-imagining diversity work as disruption in UK Higher Education

Presenters: Alison Macdonald, Toyin Agbetu, Chloe Dominique, Sally Dennehy, Harshadha Balasubramanian From Athena Swan accreditations to Access and Widening Participation and EDI agendas, the UK higher education landscape is now awash with the language of ‘diversity’ as policy and practice. The institutionalisation of ‘diversity’ is on the surface a welcome method of inclusion, yet it is often reproduced as ‘happy talk’ that pacifies the call for meaningful structural and institutional change, silencing and even reinforcing the inequality it seeks to remedy. Taking these paradoxical dimensions of diversity as our point of departure, this panel draws on material published in our Special Issue of Teaching Anthropology in 2021 to explore the concept and practice of 'disruption' as an uncomfortable yet necessary intervention in higher education diversity agendas.

[CANCELLED] 18 January - James McMurray (University of Sussex)
Re)education, the Urumqi Fire, and Han-Uyghur Relations in China

The December 2022 tower block fire in Urumqi precipitated a wave of protests across China on a scale unseen in decades. They led to an uncharacteristic about-face in Beijing’s previously steadfast commitment to the ‘zero-COVID’ policy Xi Jinping had publicly supported. Drawing on the history of COVID measures in Xinjiang in the context of Uyghur people’s experiences of mass incarceration, ‘re-education’, and previous protest movements in the region, this presentation will draw on my work exploring the relationship between education policies and identity in Xinjiang to argue that both Han participation and the striking lack of Uyghur participation in the Urumqi protests offer insight into the consequences of the crackdown in Xinjiang since 2017.

25 January - Gwen Burnyeat (University of Oxford)
The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy amid Disinformation in Colombia

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. I joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative ‘peace pedagogy’ strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. This multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with sceptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. I argue that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. I offer the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to ‘post-truth’ politics.

[Cancelled due to strike action] 1 February - Johanna Perez Gomez (UCL)
Sorcery for the Troops: Supernatural bulletproof men inside the Colombian Paramilitary 

This talk examines stories about cruzados: individuals who used sorcery to become bulletproof. During the 1990s and 2000s, such magic was popular among paramilitary combatants in Colombia's Eastern Plains. Drawing on conversations with ex-combatants and testimonials in the press and other documents, it focuses on the stories and references to cruzados circulating within the paramilitary groups. The material is part of my doctoral thesis, which is based on 13 months of fieldwork in a former paramilitary stronghold. The paper provides an overview of one of the thesis' primary themes: the ways in which cruzados reveal the ‘inhumane’ essence of these unstable organisations that survive and spread precisely through the sorcerous operation of transforming human bodies into weapons of war.

8 February - Harry Walker (LSE)
Anger and the force of law in Amazonia

Though widely feared, the emotion of anger plays a pivotal role in the moral and political lives of Urarina people of Amazonian Peru. Yet anger’s role and moral status is changing, as Urarina people increasingly engage in acts of political protest that extend well beyond the local community. New frameworks of interpretation, promoted by young indigenous leaders, help to convert diffuse feelings of resentment into righteous indignation and collective action. At the same time, the newfound availability of legal techniques for the resolution of disputes, and the prospect of community-sanctioned punishment, effectively impose a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, ‘domesticating’ anger and detaching it from vengeance, while providing a more objective footing for notions of moral offence. In this talk I reflect on the capacity of anger to motivate social action and attune people to wrongs, and on the role of emotions more generally in the constitution of a sense of justice.

Reading Week

22 February - Sian Lazar (University of Cambridge)
How we struggle: A political anthropology of labour

This talk draws on material from my recently published book to discuss possibilities for an anthropology of labour politics. In particular, I hope to explore the following questions: How can ethnography best integrate an understanding of global political economic processes with intimate life experiences and strategies (and should we even try)? How might anthropologists maintain a position of critique, especially of global (universal?) processes of exploitation and oppression, without implicitly accusing others of false consciousness? How do we do so and still properly account for accommodation, co-optation, resilience, and forms of worker agency that are not ‘resistance’? In answer, I very tentatively propose a political-methodological-theoretical orientation that I am currently calling ‘radical compassion’, which I link to the radical potential of compassion and care as political agency.

1 March - Alice Rudge (UCL)
Undoing belonging: alterity as process at the edges of a Malaysian rainforest

This paper explores the topic of alterity in an entangled world. It does so through examining how Batek people in Malaysia formulate theories of alterity through the lens of the ethical as they seek to live well on the border between a protected rainforest reserve and an oil palm plantation where encounters with the strange and the new are common. In this context, Batek people narrate encounters with alterity and draw distinctions between themselves and Others through discussion of what is right and wrong, or good or bad. But the dilemmas people express as they encounter alterity in everyday contexts – such as when they must share space and food with dead kin and living strangers – challenge essentialized notions of alterity. I therefore argue for Batek-inspired anthropological imperatives in which scholars might approach alterity as processual: a shifting ethical horizon that always contains its opposites. Thus reformulated, alterity is a responsive process of managing detachment and connection through the diverse encounters of everyday life.

8 March - Rebecca Prentice (University of Sussex)
Between the technocratic and the unruly: work, labour and precarity in times of crisis

Over recent years, anthropologists of work and labour have developed a unique understanding of precarity, based on extended ethnographic encounters with workers both ‘at work’ and in their lives and reproductive labours outside of workplaces. This approach foregrounds lived experience and shows precarity to be a carefully constructed mode of labour relations, not the inadvertent loss or lack of social protection. Drawing on insights from two ethnographic research projects – one on the unionisation efforts of Deliveroo riders in London, and another on compensation claims from survivors of Bangladesh’s most deadly garment factory disaster – this paper explores the kinds of crises that labour precarity creates. In both instances, the ‘technocratic fix’ worsens labour’s position and leaves workers exposed to evermore rebounding crises. I show that understanding the relationship between technocratic governance and labour’s creative possibilities for an unruly politics is a vital task for anthropology.

15 March - Mariya Ivancheva (University of Strathclyde)
The alternative university: lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela

Is an alternative university possible in the global field of higher education, dominated by the logic of the market? What are the contradictions and challenges that such a project might face when put to practice? To what extent can an inclusive and mass project for social change be implemented through a traditionally elitist institution such as the university? What can present day struggles and future reforms learn from such past processes? Based on extensive fieldwork in Caracas, this talk presents my work on the Venezuelan higher education reform under late President Hugo Chavez. Combining ethnography with interviews and historical and policy ethnography, I show how policy travels and is adapted in processes of social change; and how complex gender, race and class inequalities are both challenged and reproduced within an alternative university model in a post-colonial semi-peripheral petrol state. Finally, I draw on this material to outline some lessons for contemporary higher education struggles.