08 November 2010
  • Lecture Series
Universität Wien, Kleiner Festsaal 1010 Wien, Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1

Eric Wolf Lecture: Jean und John L. Comaroff: History and the People beyond Europe: A Counter-evolutionary Story?

ERIC WOLF LECTURE: Universität Wien, Kleiner Festsaal
1010 Wien, Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1

 

Rarely is “the Global South” seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events. Yet, as many nation-states of the northern hemisphere experience increasing fiscal meltdown, state privatization, corruption, ethnic conflict, and other crises, it seems as though they are evolving southward, so to speak, in both positive and problematic ways. Is this so? In what measure? In this lecture, Jean and John L. Comaroff take on these questions, seeking to reverse the usual order of things. They address a range of familiar themes – democracy, law, national borders, religion and the occult, liberalism and multiculturalism – and they ask how we might understand them anew with theory developed in the south. This view from the South renders key problems of our time at once strange and familiar, giving an ironic twist to the evolutionary pathways long assumed by social scientists, and by influential formulations like that of Eric Wolf in “Europe and the Peoples Without History.”

 

09.11.2010: 16.00–18.00 Uhr, IFK
Diskussion mit Jean und John L. Comaroff

 

Kooperationsveranstaltung von IFK, dem Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie der Universität Wien sowie dem Institut für Sozialanthropologie der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

 

Go to Jean Comaroff
Go to John L. Comaroff

 

Ort: Universität Wien, Kleiner Festsaal 1010 Wien, Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1