Department of social anthropology seminar with Diane Nelson

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to this week's seminar. Prof. Diane Nelson from the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, will present the following paper:

Accounting For and Counting On: Pyramids, General Equivalents, and the End/s of War in Guatemala

Abstract

This talk explores on-going efforts in Guatemala to account for the continuing effects of genocide as they stretch into the neoliberal post-post-war. The civil war officially ended in 1996 and the 'post-war' of UN peace keepers, international investment, NGO nation-building, the rise of the Mayan movement, and the counting up of truth commission reports ended around 2005, yet the experiences of revolutionary mobilization and scorched earth counterinsurgency remain surprisingly lively. I work with people's efforts to reckon: to simultaneously account for what occurred and to decide what or who to count on in measuring possibilities for the future. They are trying to figure out how to engage in the present's concatenation of the necro 'right of death' and bio 'power over life' of an emerging governmentality steeped in market logics. What becomes of those promises of improvement once connected to the state which is why guerrillas and their supporters risked everything to take it and elites unleashed a holocaust to hold on to it? I try to capture those vestiges in their new configurations through the notion of omni-life a sense of expansiveness, care, or something better through the tensions between equivalence (reparations) and improvement (like a pyramid project that sells a product called Omnilife®). Settling accounts as cosmopolitical (justice, possibilities for the future) is being lived out in everyday life vis a vis money, financialization, and the deepening of audit culture, and through activities that may seem resolutely removed from the war yet are haunted by its death, and through practices that seem quite distant from revolutionary ideals yet may be infused with collective possibilities. 

All are welcome!