The Mystery of the Almost Disappearing Naga: On Urbanization and Cosmopolitics in Bangkok
Seminar
Presented online only - Zoom details belowWhat might the precarious persistence of the naga in Bangkok’s critical zones illuminate about entangled relations of capitalist urbanization, migration, environmental degradation, and speculative world-renewal? Drawing on ethnographic encounters with naga…
Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean
Seminar
Presented online only - Zoom details belowMoorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and…
Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore
Seminar
Join us for a panel discussion of V. Chitra's new book, Drawing Coastlines. In this book, V. Chitra reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set…
Warlpiri women’s ceremonies of loss: Collective mourning in the Central Australian desert
Seminar
For Warlpiri people living in the Central Australian Tanami desert region, ceremonial songs and ancestral stories associated with places are intimately linked to cultural identity. Understandings of self are for individuals formed through a lifetime of education focused on these songs, dances, the…
How should we theorize ecological distress? A view from the Western Himalayas
Seminar
A litany of universalizing diagnostic concepts have been coined to theorize the psychic effects of ecological destruction and climate change in the age of the Anthropocene, including ‘eco-anxiety,’ ‘ecological grief,’ ‘climate trauma,’ and ‘solastalgia’. However, the rootedness of these theories in…
Decolonization as a State Project. New Zealand and Tokelau
Seminar
Tokelau, an atoll society comprising about 1400 people with a diasporic population of approximately 10.000 and is a “non-self-governing territory” of New Zealand. Coming under the New Zealand Administration of then Western Samoa, Tokelau has been on a path to an act of eventual self-determination…
The temporal ambiguities of Win Neisen. Transformations of historicity in the Paliau Movement (Manus, Papua New Guinea)
Seminar
Win Neisen is a local, indigenously developed church, that is the contemporary manifestation of the well-known Paliau Movement which started in Manus, Papua New Guinea, in 1946 (Mead 1956, Schwartz and Smith 2021, Otto 2021). One of its central doctrines is that reality is divided into two spheres…