Emerging Worlds Initiative
EMERGING WORLDS: CULTURE AND POWER AFTER PROGRESS
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of progress and modernization both created the concept of culture and relegated it to a nostalgic role as backward-looking sentiment. Cultural anthropologists studied “vanishing worlds.” In the last thirty years, however, such certainties have been challenged. Grand theories of human behavior that depended on the idea of a universal man have begun to fray around the edges. Heterogeneity, disjuncture, and surprising articulations of difference jump to our attention, calling out for ethnographic investigation. In this context, scholarly discussions have turned toward culture defined not as “tradition,” but as the world-making networks, geographies, innovations, meanings, and assemblages that are carrying us into the future. Our proposed program in “Emerging Worlds” takes advantage of this moment of revitalization to articulate the shape of a new disciplinary paradigm.
Across the social sciences, scholars are responding to emergent scientific and social dilemmas by turning to the concept of culture and the ethnographic method. In psychology, the study of non-Western people has drawn attention to anthropological tools. In political science, the “perestroika” movement re-introduced qualitative methods and comparative area studies. In sociology, cultural theory has gained new traction. Anthropological concepts and approaches have been taken up in the humanities and the arts as well. Such disciplinary turns grow from a challenging new set of social configurations that affect both scholarly and lay understandings of the present, past, and future: the demise of certainties about progress and modernization.
Consider the problem of “globalization.” In the early 1990s, the term carried hopes for a singularly transformed world: Once-isolated nations would become circuits of global connection. As the decade progressed, critics emerged from every side, leaving the concept in tatters. The clearest perspective, perhaps, came from anthropologists immersed in long histories and broad geographies: Contemporary global encounters carve one channel in a long history of multiple, overlapping, partial globalizations, from the Silk Road to the Muslim diaspora. This perspective illuminates the past as well as current contests over the shape of history (Christian, secular, or Muslim?) and the making of regional distinctions.
Whatever the scale of study (global, regional, or local; everyday life, historical, or longue duree), and whatever the unit of study (network, commodity chain, performance, artistic genre, food practice, memory, mind, gossip, sexuality, scientific lab, NGO, religious idiom or practice, social movement or encounter, race, diaspora, nation, community, or tribe), UCSC cultural anthropologists explore, analyze, interpret, and write about emerging worlds, not vanishing cultures. Under the rubric “culture and power,” our program during its first fifteen years pioneered new forms of ethnography, re-theorized culture to comprehend power, inequality, heterogeneity, contingency, and continuous change, and engaged conceptual innovations within and beyond the discipline. With our new programmatic focus, “emerging worlds,” we will carry this work forward and forcefully articulate Cultural Anthropology’s distinctive commitment to the study of culture as world-making practices, past, present, and future.
Engseng Ho
Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History, Duke Islamic Studies Center
Engseng Ho is author of The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the
Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2006). Professor Ho's work tells of
how Muslim sailors, scholars, merchants, and settlers from Yemen have made a
place for themselves across the Indian Ocean for the last 500 years. Through the
ties of a literate and religiously-inspired diaspora that has rivaled and challenged
European expansion, Hadrami voyagers shape a world beyond the Euro-
American imagination. Professor Ho shows how the study of non-European
texts and histories is essential to understanding the tensions and dynamics of
globalization--both in the past and today. His work challenges the modernist
categories that have informed anthropology and offers a model of how to chart
the emergence of regional worlds.
LECTURE
Ballots for Bombs: War Beyond Sovereignty, Peace Beyond Representation
Monday, November 3, 2008
Engseng Ho Podcast
Sponsored by the Anthropology Department and Center for Cultural Studies
Anne-Maria Makhulu
Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
Anne-Maria Makhulu's research interests cover South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, occult economies, neoliberalism, Marxism and anthropology of finance. The Geography of Freedom: Revolution and the South African City (in progress) examines the South African city under apartheid and immediately after the transition of democracy.
LECTURE
The Search for Economic Sovereignty: Negotiating 'Life and Debt' in Contemporary South Africa
Monday, February 23, 2009
Makhulu Podcast
Sponsored by Transnationalizing Justice Multi Campus Research Group
Ann Stahl
Anthropology, University of Victoria, British Columbia
Ann Stahl is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Her research in the Banda area of west central Ghana centers on culture-making practices and shifting global entanglements using ethnographic, oral historical, documentary, and archaeological sources.
LECTURE
Material Histories of Global Entanglements: Re-centering Africa and Provincializing Europe
Monday, March 9, 2009
Stahl Podcast
WORKSHOP
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Workshop Podcast
Sponsored by the Anthropology Department and Center for Cultural Studies
Karen Ho
Anthropology, University of Minnesota
Karen Ho's book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street will be published by Duke University Press in Summer 2009. An anthropologist who studies cultures of power in the U.S., Professor Ho examines the culture and worldviews of Wall Street financial institutions, the construction of financial markets, and the instigation of global financial crises. She teaches at the University of Minnesota, including courses on capitalism and globalization, the social construction of whiteness, and the anthropology of work and corporations.
LECTURE
The Re-emergence of Crisis Capitalism: Wall Street Investment Bankers and the Global
Monday April 13
Ho Podcast
Sponsored by the Anthropology Department and Center for Cultural Studies
Jane Guyer
Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
Jane Guyer graduated from the LSE and the University of Rochester. She has been faculty at Harvard, Boston University, Northwestern University and now Johns Hopkins University. Her research in West Africa has focused on two related themes: agricultural production; and monetization. Her most recent single-authored book is Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004). She is currently preparing a co-edited collection entitled Number as Inventive Frontier. The present paper is one of a series on Cultures of Monetarism. (http://anthropology.jhu.edu/Jane_Guyer/CultureMonetarism)
LECTURE
Hard and Soft Currencies: Cash in Everyday Life
Monday, May 18, 3:30-5
Humanities 210
Guyer Podcast
WORKSHOP
The materiality of value
Tuesday, May 19, 9am-11:30am
Social Science I, Room 261
Presenters:
Jeremy Campbell
Aviva Sinervo
Noah Tamarkin
Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Guyer Workshop Podcast
Sponsored by the Anthropology Department and Center for Cultural Studies