Panel 1: “Commitment To”: thinking commitment as an object
Didier Fassin, Elizabeth Povinelli, Sharika Thiranagama
Moderated by Ann Stoler
10am- 11:15am
In an interview with Zygmunt Bauman Keith Tester asks: “why ought social thought to be ethical?…why is your own work so ethically committed? Indeed, what is ethics?”
Bauman responds: “I am so pleased that you see my work as ‘dripping with ethical commitment.’ This is how I would like it to be, though as a moral person I do not dare to say that it indeed is, or is sufficiently. But I suspect that it would be saturated with ethics whether or not this were my conscious wish. I do not believe that a student of human reality may be ethically neutral. The sole choice we face is one between loyalty to the humiliated and to beauty, and indifference to both. It is like any other choice a moral being confronts: between taking and refusing to take responsibility for one’s responsibility.”
Zygmunt Bauman, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman
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Reflecting on the difficulty of representing violence in anthropology, Valentine Daniel ([1996] 2000: 334-335) recalls the circumstances that led him to focus on a question that he had not initially chosen to work on: ‘More than ten years have gone by since the responsibility of writing an anthropology of violence pierced, like a shriek in the dark, my world of other preoccupations.’ He was working then on Tamil culture in Sri Lanka: ‘I distinctly remember the moment of my commission. A daughter who had witnessed her father’s murdered body being dragged away by the army Jeep to which it was tied said at one point in her interview with me: ‘You’re a man who has seen the world, please take this story and tell the world of what they did to my father, how they treated him.’ What the anthropologist should do seemed very clear: his mediation would make known what had been unknown until then. Through him, a truth might be told that would otherwise disappear forever. He was to carry the message to ‘a world where the difference between good and evil still holds, but also a world that needs to be told and must not be allowed to forget.’ The anthropologist’s testimony thus answers for both a debt to the distant others and a moral obligation with regard to his own community. But suddenly this obvious imperative is shaken: At another point, in the same interview, she pleaded: “please don’t tell anyone this story. My father is such a dignified man. He never comes to dinner without bathing and without wearing a clean white shirt. I don’t want anyone to remember him the way I see him, with his clothes torn off his body.” To follow the new injunction the anthropologist must then remain silent, preserve the person of the speaker and her anonymity, choose the right to confidentiality over the advent of truth.’
Valentine Daniel – (From Didier Fassin’s When Bodies Remember)
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Panel 2: “Committed By”: Thinking about
commitment as an experience and commitment as constraint with
Allen Feldman, Neni Panourgia, and Miriam Ticktin
Moderated by Hugh Raffles
11:30-12:45
Belonging to a professional group brings into play an effect of censorship which goes far beyond institutional or personal constraints: there are questions you don’t ask, and that you can’t ask, because they have to do with the fundamental beliefs that are at the root of science, and of the way things function in the scientific domain.
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words
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Attention is by definition exclusive, the faculty of creating foreground and background, focus and fringes. But economies of attention differ not only in their preferred objects, but also in their specific practices. [...] The practices of taking notes and paying attention as they were cultivated by early modern observers tended to fragment the object of inquiry: numbered, dated notebook entries chopped up time into slices; narrowly focused attention dissolved wholes into tiny parts. The challenge to what I will call the practices of synthesis was to glue all these fragments back together again into a coherent mosaic – but not thereby to reconstitute the actual object of observation. Instead, the result of the synthesis was a general object – variously described as an archetype, an ideal, an average, or a pure phenomenon – that was more regular, more stable, more universal, more real than any actually existing object.
Lorraine Daston, Observation as a Way of Life: Time, Attention, Allegory
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And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be: if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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Can there be a just politics? Or a politics which does justice to thought? Our point of departure must be the following: injustice is clear, justice is obscure. Those who have undergone injustice provide irrefutable testimony concerning the former. But who can testify for justice? Injustice has its affect: suffering, revolt. Nothing, however, signals justice: it presents itself neither as spectacle nor as sentiment.
Is our sole issue then that of saying that justice is merely the absence of injustice? Is justice nothing more than the empty neutrality of a double negation? I do not think so. Nor do I think that injustice is to be found on the side of the perceptible, or experience, or the subjective, while justice is found on the side of the intelligible, or reason, or the objective. Injustice is not the immediate disorder of that for which justice would provide an ideal order.
Alan Badiou, Infinite Thought
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Panel 3: “Committing Anthropology”: Thinking about the emergent and the everyday
with Stephen Collier, Nicholas Langlitz, and Rayna Rapp
Moderated by Vyjayanthi Rao
2:00pm-3:15pm
The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning…
Edward Said, Orientalism
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All that is unhuman is not un-kind, outside kinship, outside the orders of signification, excluded from trading in signs and wonders.
Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan ©_Meets_OncoMouse TM: Feminism and Technoscience
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If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur; yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. As it is, though, I’ll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I’m not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live. As a matter of fact, nothing I might write could make any difference whatever. It would only be a ‘book’ at the best. If it were a safely dangerous one it would be ‘scientific’ or ‘political’ or ‘revolutionary.’ If it were really dangerous it would be ‘literature’ or ‘religion’ or ‘mysticism’ or ‘art,’ and under one such name or another might in time achieve the emasculation of acceptance. If it were dangerous enough to be of any remote use to the human race it would be merely ‘frivolous’ or ‘pathological,’ and that would be the end of that….
James Agee, Let us Now Praise Famous Men
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Then lunch with a fellow and talk – about what? – In the afternoon: I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and started work – bwaga’u business. At about 5 stopped, was fed up. Excited, impossible to concentrate. Ate pineapple, drank tea, wrote E.R.M., took a walk; intensive gymnastics. Gymnastics should be a time of concentration and solitude; something that gives me an opportunity to escape from the [blacks] and my own agitation. Supper with a fellow who told me stupid anecdotes, not interesting
at all.
Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term
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