ADVANCED SEMINARS / 2022
Rescheduled: March 6 – 10, 2022
Oikography: Home and Housing in Ethnography and Critical Theory
Co-chaired by João Biehl, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, and Federico Neiburg, Professor of Social Anthropology, Department of Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
This seminar foregrounds the house as a site of empirical analysis and theoretical exploration, drawing from a range of ethnographic contexts. Taking the oikos as at once a built structure, a collection of relations and affects, and a node in neighborhoods and larger political, economic, and bio-chemical systems, participants move across scales to ask how people’s lives and worlds are made and remade in relation to the house and housing configurations.
April 24 – 28, 2022 New Date
The Matter of Imperial Politics: Archaeological Contributions to Understanding the Role of Things in Productions of Power
Chaired by Tamara Bray, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, and Lori Khatchadourian, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University
In line with the material turn across a wide swath of the social sciences and humanities, this seminar aims to bring objects in from out of the cold–in this case, with the specific goal of deepening our understanding of power by relating it to materiality. The goal is to focus, from a globally comparative perspective, on the political work of things in the context of early imperial states by developing a broad comparative understanding of how such assemblages work to make and unmake political power.