Live Free and Die: How Ontologies of Freedom are Killing Americans
29 November 2023
 
Abstract
Despite the United States’ national wealth and international power, Americans are sicker and die much earlier than people in most wealthy nations and many poorer nations. This talk focuses on why from the perspective of Lake County, California which has one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the state. It also happens to be one of the whitest counties, with about 87 percent identifying as white, about 5 percent as indigenous, and 2 percent as black. Lake County is also one of the poorest counties, but because of structural racism many low income white residents own property. They also associate their private property ownership with their freedom which is why many are also anti-government. Given this, the county has chosen to improve health by changing people’s relationship to their property through code enforcement. This talk describes this radical experiment in what I am calling an economy of care at the ends of capitalism.

Emotional Entanglements, Vulnerability, and the Search for Recognition: A New Kind of Health?
1 December 2023
 
Abstract
When 22-year-old James wants to tell his boyfriend something important, he avoids face-to-face communication and messages him instead; “it’s easier to talk about your feelings online,” he explains, “because you can quickly change the topic.” James is one of many New Zealand youth who strategically employ distance to enable an intimacy that feels otherwise potentially uncontrollable. Young people, including James, are also, however, deeply attune to how online emotional engagements entail their own pitfalls. This includes the humiliation of being caught out by those unnecessarily vying for attention and the exhaustion of undertaking “emotional labour” on behalf of others. Drawing from Paul Ricouer’s theory of recognition alongside Emmanuel Levinas’ work on the “infinity” of the Other, this presentation examines young New Zealanders’ self-described communicative practices, in particular their careful navigation of online emotional entanglements to maximize meaningful connection while protecting themselves from inter-personal disappointments and threats. I argue that young people are often highly self-reflexive about their attempts to open up safe avenues for emotional disclosure. In doing so, I ask what kinds of emotional ideologies are at play in contemporary enactments of intimacy, vulnerability, distancing, and care. I also ask, what does any of this have to do with new understandings of health? 

Ensuring Anthropology Matters – To Others
3 Dec 2019



Abstract
Would you concur that, perhaps, all is not well today with cultural/social anthropology? On the one hand, there is considerable pressure for accountability from those beyond the field who fund its research. They want to know how their money is being spent. Given most anthropology publications are hard for laymen to understand and administrators are unsure how to measure public benefit, administrators lean, perhaps by default, toward metrics for framing accountability – the more publications the better. On the other hand, the field has certain problematic dynamics. With its focus on individual, independent fieldwork and specialization, it is unclear whether the field’s constant research and publications are producing more knowledge – defined in terms of trustworthy information one can rely on above and beyond individual knowledge claims of veracity. Moreover, few talk across their specialized niches to address broader problems – within the field or within the broader society.

By repeatedly publishing material of limited value to those beyond the field, anthropologists may be perpetuating their own marginalization. In protecting their intellectual purity from others (in Mary Douglas’ terms), anthropologists are making themselves more vulnerable to the demands of those outside the field. Anthropology is losing its ability to chart its own fate.

Is there a way out? Perhaps. But it involves changing the way anthropologists operate – moving beyond the appearance of benefiting others to being able to offer something more substantive that will raise the field’s public value and thereby reduce the drumbeat for publications that few non-anthropologists read and value. That is what this talk is about: ensuring anthropology matters to others.

Attitude! Doing Anthropology in a Utilitarian World
4 Dec 2019



Abstract
“But what use is it?” ask my engineer and banker cousins. “It’s all very interesting…” trails off the voice of my economist colleague. “I hope you will write a report that we can send to the press,” says my activist friend. What do others expect of anthropologists and what do we expect of ourselves? How are these expectations met, repudiated and negotiated? I shall reflect on these questions from my position as an India-based practitioner who must contend with the legacies of colonial epistemologies and postcolonial imperatives in an increasingly neoliberal academy and Hindu-supremacist nation-state. I shall argue that the value of critical humanism that is central to anthropology is more vital than ever; the challenge is to uphold it in ways that include and reach beyond the academy.

Professor Assa Doron, (Anthropology Program, School of Culture, History & Language, CAP, ANU) in conversation with Professor Amita Baviskar (Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India) and Professor Robert Borofsky, (Center for a Public Anthropology, Hawaii Pacific University, USA).

Investigating the ‘complexity of change’ and ‘adaptive challenges’ of the Anthropocene: Anthropology, interdisciplinarity, and methodology
13 Dec 2016

Beyond the Anthropocene and back to environmental justice: Anthropogenic impact in the Pacific Islands
14 Dec 2016

Moral Horizons: Marriage in Mayotte
2 Dec 2015

Engaging Evil: Neocannibalism and Military-Terrorist Necropolitics
3 Dec 2015

Refracted Time: From Historicity to Legal Technique in the “Comfort Women” Controversy
4 Dec 2015

Plenary discussion convened by Gerhard Hoffstaedter (University of Queensland), with Greg Downey (Macquarie University), Tess Lea (University of Sydney) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California, Berkeley)
4 Dec 2015