Workshops and conferences

Workshop and PhD course organized during the 2008 Bergen Summer Research School

Course 8: Global Reconfigurations of Poverty and the Public: Anthropological perspectives and ethnographic challenges

 

Course Leader:

 

• Vigdis Broch-Due, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, UiB

 

Invited course leaders:

 

• Jean Comaroff, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago

• Alice O'Connor , Associate Professor, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

 

Short Course description:

 

“The Poor”, - a group figuring so prominently in contemporary media and the discourses of aid, human rights and global insecurity, in fact consist largely of the classical subjects of anthropology. While anthropologists continue to produce ethnography about the specificities of different peoples in impoverished settings, few address the problems that arise when all that cultural diversity is subsumed under the headings “Poverty” or “the Poor”. Anthropologists who do address questions of poverty are often sidelined in increasingly globalised policy debates that set quantitative “goals” and seek measurable formulae for attaining them.Why are anthropologists vocal on the plight of distinct peoples but silent or marginalized on the subject of the “the poor”? How do we as anthropologists research, theorize, let alone compose ethnographies, that focus on such a diffuse, standardised, globalised entity as “poverty” and “the Poor”? Should we? And what are the consequences of remaining on the sidelines? These urgent questions outline the analytical challenges of this PhD course. The approach will be historical as well as theoretical, drawing on the history of ideas, motives, and technologies for defining poverty and relating that history to contemporary anthropological dilemmas. The course will, for instance, critically examine the conundrums and ideas arising from the 19th century global reconfiguration of “poverty” and the “public” during the era of colonialism. It will look at encounters with immigrants and with colonized and domestic racial “others.” It will trace the rise of Cold War era development and modernization projects, and it will chart the consequences of the contemporary neo-liberal demotion of poverty from social phenomenon to personal defect. Understanding these transformations, and the new connections and configurations they have created around the world, is a challenge that has largely been ignored by anthropology to its cost. It is the challenge that this course takes up.

 

 

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Workshop outline:

PLACE VERSUS PATH
Reconfiguring Nomads to fit the State

University of Bergen, June 7-10, 2007

One of the areas of greatest recent interest in social theory - and the focus of our long-running research Project at the University of Bergen: “Poverty Politics” - has been the effects of new forms of economy and governance, typically glossed as Neoliberalism, in a variety of contexts around the globe.  How has Neoliberalism reconfigured fundamental ideas of “the Private” and “the Public” - of personhood, citizenship, sociality and statehood?  What are the processes in these different arenas that Neoliberalism has sparked?
 African pastoralist societies present a uniquely interesting context in which to engage in ethnographically grounded theorizing concerning these reconfigurations of the private and public.   Pastoralism seems to be a form of sociality and livelihood radically opposed to the very idea of the State, often, through history, in real political terms but also in the core principles of its social organization. Pastoralist societies are typically characterized by communally held land, overlapping rights in livestock, and some form of nomadism. The flexibility intrinsic in pastoral life has led to fluid notions of personhood and social identity. It is the Path rather than Place that has historically been the guiding spatial metaphor of pastoralist societies. 
After a century of being encapsulated in colonial and postcolonial state systems, pastoralist ways of life have been challenged and  problematized by  forms of governance that have  been  paternalistic, distant and uncomprehending.  State schemes of incorporation, “development”, modernization, - all pushed through by sedentarization - have been predicated on ideas of citizenship and control fundamentally antithetical to the Pastoralist way of life. Their effects have too often been marginalization and the destruction of pastoralist livelihood strategies. 
This is not surprising given that the very ideas and historical impetus behind the State have all arisen from non-pastoral contexts and rest upon the desire for controllable, fixable, definable and taxable social entities. The State is quintessentially a sedentary entity. No State has ever been comfortable with nomads who typically constitute its unruly “underbelly”, disregarding boundaries and all forms of centralized power.
In recent times, forms of state governance in Africa have undergone dramatic shifts, as they have in many contexts around the globe.  Many of the more “paternalistic” forms of governance and development have given way to more diffuse, entrepreneurial forms, emphasizing individual initiative and individual/community responsibility.  These developments render pastoralist societies particularly complex and interesting examples through which to explore the myriad (and probably paradoxical) impact of the “Reconfiguration of the Public”.

This, then, is the background to our Conference: Place versus Path. It aims to explore a number of topics which can all be prisms reflecting the fascinating problematic of reconfiguring a pastoralist public.

1) Boundaries: What are the effects of state-imposed administrative and political boundaries on pastoralists’ politics and economies? What are the particular pastoralists boundary-making processes in terms of territory, ethnicity and corporeal devices (body modification, costume etc)?  What are the effects of these multiple forms of boundary making for the relations between pastoralists communities themselves? How permeable or rigid are these various boundaries, and how are they being reconfigured over time, if at all?  

2) Violence and dislocation: How has interethnic violence changed in East Africa in the late 20th and early 21st centuries? How have these changes led to new forms of dislocation and disenfranchisement? How can these changes be understood in the context of local, national, and global identities and citizenship?

3) Land use and land rights: How do the notions of “public” and “private” that accompanied colonial land tenure policies inflect contemporary, 21st century conflicts and debates concerning land use and land rights? To what extent do ethnic assumptions underlying colonial circumscriptions of land boundaries continue to play a role in these conflicts and debates? What reconfigurations of the “public” are taking place through these historically contingent debates, conflicts, acts of violence, and accompanying forms of dislocation?

4) Landscape and memory: How do African pastoralist and Euro-American understandings and collective memories relating to land use and landscape intersect? To what extent have marginalized pastoralist groups in Africa begun to make strategic and productive use out of these intersections? To what extent have indigenous collective memories of landscape translated into reconfigurations of (indigenous) publics?

5) Cultural property rights and public history: How has an emerging awareness of cultural property rights and cultural heritage inflected indigenous understandings of land use and landscape? Can we speak, in this context, of reconfigurations of the public, reconfigurations of history, and of indigenous constructions of public history?

 6) Tourism: How have African pastoralists made strategic and productive use of the concept and practices of tourism? In what ways have they strategically reconfigured their own publics and privates around tourism? To what extent has tourism reconstructed pastoralists? What are the effects of the corporate branding of certain areas according to ethnic markers or type of tourism (like eco-tourism)? 

7) Local elite, national, and global representations of pastoralists: What role have representations of pastoralists in local, national, and global contexts played in all of these reconfigurations of pastoralist publics? To what extent have such representations become the agentive mechanisms for these reconfigurations and in what ways have pastoralists manipulated these representations for their own purposes?

List over participants

Astrid Blystad
Associate Professor at the Centre for International Health and Department of Public Health and Primary Health Care, University of Bergen, Norway

Michael Bollig
Professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany

Vigdis Broch-Due
Professor at the Department for Social Anthropology and leader for the Poverty Politics Project, University of Bergen, Norway

Suzette Heald
Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, UK

Amrik Heyer
Freelance Consultant Anthropologist, Kenya

Dorothy L. Hodgson
Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, USA

Sharon Hutchinson
Professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Ivan Karp
Professor of Liberal Arts and African Studies and Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Public Scholarship, Emory University, USA  

Naomi Kipuri
Director at Arid Lands Institute, Kenya

Corinne A. Kratz
Professor of Anthropology & African Studies and Co-director, Centre for the Study of Public Scholarship, Emory University, USA

Paul Lane
Director of the Marie Curie HEEAL project at the Departement of Archaeology, University of York, UK

Carolyn Lesorogol
Assistant Professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University, USA

Peter D. Little
Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Kentucky, USA

Knut Myhre
Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden

Paul Nugent
Professor of Comparative African History and Director at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK

Katherine Snyder
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York, USA

Bilinda Straight
Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University, USA

Steven Van Wolputte
Expertise Researcher at the Africa Research Centre (ARC), Faculty of Social Sciences, Leuven, Belgium

 

 

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Wednesday 3 May 2006:

Workshop for the projectS PARTICIPANTS and the students at the anthropology of development-program

The workshop will be held at the seminar room at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Fosswinkelsgt. 6, 8th floor. The projects post-doctoral researcher John McNeish will hold an introduction lecture based on his recent fieldwork in Bolivia and Guatemala. Afterwards the floor will be opened for comments and discussions about the participants own projects. Some food will be served. Time: 14.15 pm and onwards.

 

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The Public Reconfigured:
The Production of Poverty in an Age of Advancing Liberalism

Baroniet Rosendahl, Norway 23-25 SEPTEMBER 2005

This is the first of a series of workshops planned as part of the "Poverty Politics" research project at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Bergen. It is funded by the Norwegian Research Coucil. The workshop series as a whole aims to radically question the established tenets of international poverty reduction policy and practice. In this workshop, The Public Reconfigured, we draw on a range of perspectives from the social sciences to examine the transformed understanding of private and public entailed by neo-liberalism and its impact on the world’s marginalised.

The shrinking space of The Public and the ever more privatized conditions of global trade and development have been widely protested and critiqued, but there is still a notable absence of coherent alternative visions. It is in this context that a re-evaluation and re-theorization of the public seems so important. Whilst there has been great interest in the effects of new forms of economy and governance across the social sciences, the existing accounts of these transformations have been largely limited by their broad characterisation as transcultural phenomenon. So far few efforts have been made to understand the embedding, or translation of these phenomena in specific historical, cultural and geographical contexts. While it is reasonable to argue that shifts in governmentality produce comparable effects in different places, one cannot assume that the effects are always similar. Communities’ relationships to broader political structures are in fact highly variable. Neoliberalism is less a set of specific policies per se, than a range of broadly conceived assumptions about the role of the state in public life: that “the State” is no longer required to answer all society's needs; that individuals must take on most of the responsibility for their own well-being, and that poverty is less a social problem to be corrected through a paternalistic state, than a personal challenge to be overcome through the initiative of individuals and communities. Neoliberalism’s ideological vagueness gives rise to a set of expected policies and developments, but also to a plethora of discourses and forms of contestation through which particular interests seek to bend its general thrust to their own ends. This whole arena, both of neoliberal policies and of the strategic responses to them, rests upon different evaluations of the nature and significance of both public and the private.

In The Public Reconfigured we aim to collect a range of first rate empirical and theoretical studies that respond to these complexities. We intend The Public Reconfigured to make an important contribution to the current state of policy and practise for poverty reduction. To this end, we invite papers that question how neo-liberalism and new development policies transform the meaning and processes of poverty and development? Do these policies reduce or produce poverty? How do they transform social life, and communities’ relationships to natural resources and appropriate technologies? What impact does the new emphasis on volunteerism and community service have on welfare provision and development assistance? How has the impoverishment of civil life, and the fall of Public Man impacted on the legitimacy of the state, and the expressions of culture, family, community and national identity? What impact do neoliberal policies have on people’s sense of self and identities as subjects, or as gendered actors in development? What significance do these changes have for existing discourses of rights, and of democratic understandings of inclusion and exclusion? By defining the mission of anti-poverty programs as building self-confidence, social capital, capabilities and capacities, are old assumptions about poverty as pyschological and moral deficiency being recycled? Conversely, what importance does a "politics of the public" have for the poor? What values or demands should be attached to such a politics?

List of participants

1. Prof. Vigdis Broch-Due Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway.

2. Dr. Morten Bøas Institute for Labour and Social Research (FAFO), Oslo, Norway

3. Prof. Gudrun Dahl Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm, Sweden

4. Dr. Hartley Dean Department of Policy Studies, London School of Economics, U.K.

5. Annelin Eriksen Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway

6. Dr. Roberto Gargarella Faculty of Law, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway

7. Prof. Penny Harvey School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, U.K.

8. Dr. David Lewis Department of Policy Studies, London School of Economics, U.K.

9. Dr. John McNeish Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway

10. Prof. Maxine Molyneux Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, U.K.

11. Dr. Knut Nustad Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway

12. Dr. Alice O’Connor Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

13. Dr. Sarah Radcliffe Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, U.K.

14. Dr. Oscar Lopez Rivera Facultad Latinamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Guatemala

15. Dr. Ramiro Molina Rivero Universidad de la Cordillera and Fundación Diálogo Comunidades y Medio Ambiente (FDCMA), La Paz, Bolivia

16. Jon Harald Sande Lie Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway

17. Thorvald Sirnes Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Norway

18. Dr. Asuncion St. Clair Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway

19. Dr. Charlotte Widmark Institute of Latin American Studies (LAIS), Stockholm, Sweden.