Professor Jane Guyer (Johns Hopkins University)
Anthropological Recuperations: Intellectual and Social
In honour of the 95th anniversary of the inauguration of the Frazer Lecture in 1921, after the Great War, taking inspiration from Mauss’s Essay on the Gift written in the same period, drawing from themes in my recent course in the history of anthropology, Revolutions and Recuperations, and living in a time when precariat increasingly depicts the lives of the common people, I take Frazer’s famous account of the biblical Great Flood, and other great floods, to examine the place of anthropology in recuperation and anticipation after catastrophe. Our discipline is an intellectual meeting ground, and an empirical endeavour. I trace out the conceptual terms, empirical foci, capture of imagery, and intellectual engagements through which certain past and recent works have addressed life “after the deluge”: Frazer, Mauss and Das (as classics), and most recently, the post-disaster ethnographies of Jackson and Sommers (after war in Africa) and Browne (after Hurricane Katrina).
All are welcome to attend.