Department seminar: Keir Martin
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Professor Keir Martin, University of Oslo. The title of the lecture is "The Reality of Dreams and the Dream of Reality: 'Tubuans' and Corporations in East New Britain and Beyond".
Main content
Seminar paper
In this paper, I take a series of dreams that I had during anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea as my departure point. The dreams involved ‘visitation’ by the tubuan; an ancestral spirit central to many local ritual practices. Some of these visitations seemed to blur a simple distinction between dream and reality or a distinction between the tubuan as internal or external object.
I relate this to arguments advocating the existence of an ontological opposition between a Western capitalist modernity that seeks to expel non-human actors from political economy and non-Western, especially indigenous ontologies that acknowledge such actors (e.g. sacred mountains or spirits). One potential oversight in such accounts is the central role of non-human persons and agents in processes of capitalist resource extraction. In particular, corporations are explicitly recognised in both the US and UK as legal persons, separate from their human owners, with accordant rights, obligations and protections.
By taking the interaction of tubuans and corporations as two different kinds of non-human agents as my starting point, I seek to ethnographically illustrate the ways in which the acknowledgment of the separate existence of particular non-human entities comes in and out of being as they are constructed as objects from shifting social perspectives; a process that is itself central to the reconfiguration of new forms of sociality and inequality.
About the lecturer
Keir Martin is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Oslo. Read more about Keir Martin here.