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Anthropology Department361 Social Sciences 1Santa Cruz, CA 95064
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| View News Home Anthropology Fall 2009 Colloquia Ian Whitmarsh Jason Throop University of California Los Angeles Latitudes of Loss: On the Vicissitudes of Empathy This talk will examine the topic of loss, the vicissitudes of empathy, and the existential complexity and temporal dynamics of our subjective lives in relation to the lived experiences of others. In it, I will focus specifically on some observations I had about the dynamics of empathy and the experience of loss during my most recent trip back to the island of Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia. There for a little less than a month, I had the unfortunate occasion to attend four of the ten funerals that had happened to occur on the island during that time. Through exploring my own engagements with loss and the context of loss in the lives of my Yapese consociates and friends, I set out to highlight a range of intersubjective experiences that might be variously classified as empathetic. This is a range that varies from moments of connection to moments of disconnection, from feelings of mutual understanding, attunement, and compassion to feelings of confusion, misalignment, and singularity when confronting the at times impenetrability of another¹s and our own subjective lives. In so doing, I argue for the significance of recognizing that empathy is rarely an all or nothing affair. It is instead a process that is temporally arrayed, intersubjectively constituted, and culturally patterned, and yet at times is still able to escape the limits of such contextual emplacement, spilling over, even if fleetingly, to new horizons of intersubjective understanding. Monday, November 30, 3:30-5 261 Social Sciences 1 Recent ColloquiaMelissa Cefkin IBM Almaden Research Center The Corporate Encounter and Anthropology’s Practices Monday, October 19, 3:30-5 261 Social Sciences 1 The global economic ‘crisis’ has induced a cycle of angst-ridden commentary and hand-wringing both within and about the institutions and practices driving economic conditions. Repeated “discovery” of the crisis’s hidden causes appear in the press weekly, pointing often to two things: the limitations of dominant algorithmic regimes and model-driven decision-making practices on the one hand, and the seemingly invisible existence of ‘irrational’ and unforeseen human behaviors and practices, on the other. And yet, companies and other powerful institutions have for some time sought to explore and exploit the “people” and “practices” dimensions of their existence. Anthropologists and other ethnographic practitioners have entered such institutions as participants, invited there to affect their thinking and actions in areas ranging from product and service design to organizational and strategic consulting. It is vital to ask after the effect of anthropological thinking and ethnographic practices on these organizations, and after the practices, impact, and quandaries of this work more generally. I describe the contours of this growing field, considering in particular how this work is positioned both within industry and within intellectual traditions of cultural analysis such as anthropology. In the spirit of a still forming domain of work, I end not with conclusions but with new openings. In the later part of the paper I turn to an exploration of questions raised by the role played by the notion of “practice” in this work. The notion of “practice” has provided ethnographers in industry a theoretically nuanced yet empirically resonant conceptual means with which to frame and ground their work. Other notions central to the anthropological lexicon, such as “culture” and “community”, have tremendous (if at times troubled) currency in organizational domains. Does the notion of practice operate similarly in the halls of power in which corporate anthropologists ply their trade? If so, in what ways? And what contributions, if any, have been added to theories of practice as a result of the corporate encounter? Podcast Link: Cefkin_10_19_09.mp3 Pamela Ballinger Bowdoin College Rhythms, Ruins, and Repatriation: New Perspectives on Displacement What happens when regimes grounded in monumentalist aesthetics and conceptions of time come to an end? How do individuals inhabit and negotiate the debris of such state formations, particularly individuals who experience displacement as the result of these processes of “ruination” (to use Ann Stoler’s phrasing)? This talk explores these issues in the context of migration to the Italian peninsula after World War II by Italian nationals displaced from a variety of territories (formal colonies, departments, and integral parts of the state ceded to other powers) lost with fascism’s defeat. In relation to these particular forms of displacement, the speaker examines a number of features associated with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of "rhythmanalysis" such as tempo, scale, and periodicity and inquires into the productivity of the rhythmanalysis concept for students of displacement. Monday, November 2, 3:30-5 261 Social Sciences 1 Podcast Link: Ballinger_11_2_09.mp3 Liisa Malkki Stanford University BEAR HUMANITY: Children, Animals, and Other Power-Objects of the Humanitarian Imagination "This paper is a fragment of a book on the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism. It is based on ethnographic research (1995-present) with Finnish Red Cross nurses, doctors, therapists, and other professionals who participate in international aid missions in war and other crisis zones, for example, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan. Key themes include: neutrality and professionalism; affect and the imagination; internationalism in the humanitarian imagination; and the interrelations among craft, the gift, and concern with the environment". Monday, November 16, 3:30-5 261 Social Sciences 1
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