Security in the Age of (In)Humanity
Pluralizing the Anthropocene
Pluralizing the Anthropocene
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Schedule: 14:00 - 15:30 (UTC + 1)
The session will be in English
Registration: Events
will take place online. All welcome but registration required by this link
Michael Herzfeld (Harvard University)
Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS/ Sci-Tech Asia)
Appeals to
“security” are made by state actors around the world as justifications for
excessive control, and this model has worked well also for neoliberal operators
and those wealthy enough to be able to pay for the enclosure of their living
spaces against a presumed danger from “outside.” It has been universalized as
“planetary security,” thereby providing legitimacy for a wide range of
arbitrary acts of social, cultural, and racial exclusion, and ultimately for a
refusal of humanity’s collective responsibility for bio-diversity as well as
linguistic and cultural diversity. Different but mutually parallel and mutually
reinforcing forms of sovereignty are thus invoked to justify discriminatory
practices all of which offend against the very idea of a common humanity and
make a mockery of the term “Anthropocene” and suggest the need for a
reconsideration of its utility and an assessment of the danger that it could be
deliberately misconstrued. Concomitantly, expropriations of common living space
often go hand-in-hand with defiant abuses of the right to free speech and free
action, ignoring the social contract and the attendant mutual responsibilities
that underlie such concepts and subjugating them to totalitarian impulses at
every level. Yet what if we ask what calls for planetary security mean for the
homeless, the dispossessed, and the stateless? What if we ask what freedom of
speech means to those who are hurt most by its misapplication? How do cultural
differences – for example, those revealed in local habits of excuse-making and
concepts of blame and causation – shape the answers to these questions, and how
can anthropologists contribute to a global debate by re-anchoring the planetary
in the details of highly local social arrangements?
Related
Michael Herzfeld (Ernest E. Monrad Research
Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Harvard
University; former and founding Director (2014-18), Thai Studies Program, Asia
Center, Harvard University); and Senior Advisor on Critical Heritage Studies to
the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, and Visiting Professor
at Leiden University. He is also Chiang Jang Scholar and Visiting Professor at
Shanghai International University, and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the
Faculty of Arts, Melbourne University. His research interests cover social theory, history of anthropology,
social poetics, knowledge politics, politics of history and heritage,
crypto-colonialism, artisanship, and the practice of comparison, and is ethnographically
focused on Europe (especially Greece & Italy) and Southeast Asia
(specifically Thailand). He is the author of eleven books (most recently Siege
of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok, 2016) and Cultural Intimacy:
Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Institutions, and Societies, 2016),
and is the producer of two films about Rome and currently working on two films
about Bangkok. Herzfeld was Lewis Henry Morgan Lecturer for 2018 with a topic
focusing on “subversive archaism” in Greece and Thailand; the book version will
appear in 2021 as Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the
Politics of National Heritage (Duke University Press). A former editor of
American Ethnologist, editor at large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”)
for Anthropological Quarterly, co-editor of the “New Anthropologies of Europe:
Perspectives and Provocations” series at Berghahn Books and of the IIAS Asian
Heritages series at Amsterdam University Press, he holds honorary degrees from
the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki),
and the University of Crete, and is a past winner of the J.I. Staley Prize, the
J.B. Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art, and the Rivers Memorial Medal.