Ilana Gershon, Visiting Professor to Helsinki Social Sciences 2019-21,

will be giving her first seminar at Helsinki on Tuesday, 7^th May, 16 – 18, U35 h.113

“Theorizing Multiple Social Orders and Leaky Boundaries”,

to be held 16:15 – 17:45 on Tuesday 7^th May 2019, in room 113, Unioninkatu 35.

Abstract: In this talk, I want to propose that ontological perspectivism is not the only theoretical movement in anthropology wrestling with the uneasy legacy that the culture concept has left in its theoretical wake.  A growing number of anthropologists are taking on board ontological perspectivists’ complicated engagement with the analytical possibilities promised by culture, but starting from a different intellectual first cut.  While ontological perspectivists presume Others exist within a single different ontology, multiple social orders (MSO) theorists believe that their fieldwork interlocutors are constantly navigating multiple social orders.  They ask: how do people on the ground manage to move between different social orders in their daily lives, social orders that not only ethnographers find contradictory but that the people themselves on the ground sometimes find challenging to live with simultaneously as they move, sometimes rapidly, between these epistemologically and ontologically different ways of carving up the world.  To ask the question ethnographically, how do the same people manage to engage in kula trade and go to the market, how do they manage to go to church and respect the ancestors properly, all in the same week?  At its core, this is a question of imagination — how do ethnographers approach the multiple social imaginations that allow people to create and cross multiple social orders that at different moments complement and contradict each other?  In this talk, I explore how beginning from the premise that everyone lives among leaky multiple social orders encourages anthropologists to explore questions surrounding how the boundaries of social orders are created and maintained, how people, objects, and ideas circulate translated across social orders, and how people navigate the spacetime of different social orders.

 

Ilana Gershon is the Ruth N. Hall Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She earned her PhD at the University of Chicago and has taught at Yale and Emerson College (Boston), and held research fellowships at the University of London, the Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Notre Dame and the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Stanford. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in Samoa and the United States, and her published research covers areas such as legal anthropology, the anthropology of work, new media use, science studies, and diasporic societies. She is the author of four monographs, seven edited volumes, and 45 articles, and has given 30 invited guest lectures at academic institutions in Britain, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the U.S.A. Her most recent book is published by the University of Chicago Press, and is entitled Down and Out In the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo25799564.html ).

 

All welcome.