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?