SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY SEMINAR - MONDAY 14TH DECEMBER 2015 - RUPERT STASCH (CAMBRIDGE)
| Dates: | 14 December 2015 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Rupert Stasch |
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Social Anthropology Seminar
Monday, 14 December 2015
4:15-6:00pm
(Tea and Coffee will be available outside the boardroom at 4:00pm)
Dr Rupert Stasch, University of Cambridge
Title: "Singapore, Big Village of the Dead: Cities as Figures of Desire, Domination, and Rupture for Korowai of Indonesian Papua"
This talk examines the importance of cities in the political consciousness of Korowai people of Papua, Indonesia. Only a small fraction of Korowai have visited cities, and the very idea of urban space is historically new to them. Yet Korowai today avidly discuss these distant population centers, as figures of structures of ethnic and wealth inequality they now live within. One prominent pattern is for Korowai to link cities with death, such as by saying that people go to Singapore when they die. I explore how this alignment of cities and death is a small part of a much wider “structure of feeling” in which people seize upon spatial forms as favoured media through which to reckon cognitively with a whole historical situation of anthropological difference, domination, desire, and temporal rupture. Korowai associate death and bereavement with the contradictory, systematic joining of multiple emotional and evaluative feelings, such as desire or involvement alongside repulsion or separateness. I argue that there is an affinity between these aspects of the experience of death and the similar contradictory unity of multiple feelings experienced under the new political geography of urban articulations.
2.016/2.017, Second Floor Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building
ALL WELCOME!
Speaker
Rupert Stasch
Role: Speaker
Organisation: Cambridge
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2nd floor Boardroom, 2.016 / 2.017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
