Firth lectures

The ASA is delighted to make the text of its annual Firth lectures available online.

2012
Prof Arjun Appadurai, New School, NY
To follow shortly

2011
Prof Tim ingold, University of Aberdeen
Walking with dragons: an anthropological excursion on the wild side

Abstract:
Contemporary scientists often compare the natural world to a book whose contents can be read by those with the requisite expertise. There is indeed a parallel in the modern constitution between the book of nature and the nature of the book. For mainstream science the division between what there is and what we know seems self-evident; the problem lies in reaching an accommodation between them. I argue, however, that the opposite is true. The hard thing is to force a rupture between the existence of a world and the possibility of our knowing it. Moving through the world rather than roaming its surface, our knowledge is not built up on the outside of our earthly being but unfolds from the inside. We grow into the world, as the world grows in us. Perhaps this grounding of knowing in being is key to the kind of sensibility we call ‘religious’. It is because of the way it subverts the effort to divide knowing from being that religious sensibility seems to collide with objective science. For science turns the relation between knowing and being inside out. This inversion has silenced both nature and the book. Drawing on studies of medieval monasticism and of indigenous peoples, with particular reference to encounters with other-than-human beings, I suggest an alternative way of reading which allows us to take counsel from the voices of the pages and of the world around us, and to heal the rupture between the world and our imagination of it.

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2010
Prof Vincent Crapanzano, CUNY
Contortions of forgiveness: betrayal, abandonment, and narrative entrapment among the Harkis

Abstract:
Triggered by research on the Harkis, I explore the social dynamics and mental gymnastics of apology, forgiveness, and revenge and their consequences. The Harkis are Algerians, around 250,000, who served as auxiliary troops for the French during the Algerian War of Independence and who were refused entry to France at the war’s end. Within months, as many as 150,000 were slaughtered by the Algerian population at large. Most Harkis who managed to escape to France were interned, some for sixteen years, in camps and forestry hamlets. They have demanded recognition of the sacrifices they made for France, compensation for their losses, and an apology for their abandonment. Although the French have given them recognition and some compensation, they have not apologized. What are the consequences of this refusal? Would the Harkis accept an apology? Would their refusal to forgive be their vengeance? I argue that France’s failure to apologize perpetuates the Harkis’ identity and entraps them in their story. Are apology, forgiveness, and vengeance simply forms of social etiquette? Or, do they require inner transformation (say, contrition)? Or, is inner transformation simply rhetorical? By contrasting inter-personal forgiveness and political apology I call attention to how articulating collective dynamics in terms of mental ones can legitimate political acts. In part, this possibility lies in the asymmetrical relationship between apology by proxy (i.e. by a representative who speaks for the collectivity) and its reception by individual members of the collectivity. In part it rests on the variable value societies give to inner life.

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This will be included in the ASA monograph from the 2010 conference, published by Berg. More info on our monograph series go here.

2009
Prof Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
Careers of the copy: simulating sites and monuments in colonial and post-colonial India

Abstract:
It is an aphorism of our times that we are living in the age of the copy. The notion of this age stretches backwards in time to different nodal points in modernity when new technologies of reproduction invested the duplicate and double with the full powers of substituting the original, and allowed it a mobility and circulation that gave it a life far in excess of its authorizing source. But it also keeps hurtling towards a present that is connoted by the unruliness and ungovernability of the copy, in the way it tends to completely extricate itself from its referent, subvert its authority and become a sign only of itself. A capacity for limitless proliferation, ingenious improvisations and transplantation in different settings becomes the contemporary hallmarks of the copy. In this paper, I will be focusing on architectural replicas and recreations, and on the kinds of travels they embark on in India's colonial and contemporary histories. In keeping with the theme of this conference, I will treat the monumental replica as a central entity that has sustained, over time, the popular imaginaries of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, and has served as the grounds on which professional knowledges came to be configured within new public domains of display and spectatorship. I will also use the divergent forms, claims and aspirations of these fabrications as a way of marking out their post-colonial careers from their colonial pasts – and as a way of distinguishing the popular from the official, the regional from the national, the local from the global trends of replications.      

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2008
Prof Janice Boddy, University of Toronto
Anthropology and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Sudan

Abstract:
The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was a crucible of anthropology. Not only the place where several notable figures did path-breaking research, it was also one of the contexts in which the contribution of ethnography to administration was assayed.  The lecture examines the assumptions behind ethnographic information-gathering and practice during Sudan's colonial period, from the first Wellcome expeditions at the turn of the 20th century, through the founding of Sudan Notes and Records in 1919, Dame Margery Perham's description of colonial officers as "unconscious anthropologists," and the different methods adopted by scholars to understand Muslim and non-Muslim Sudanese.

Download lecture as a PDF; accompanying PDF of map (2.5MB)