Department of social anthropology seminar with Niko Besnier

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Niko Besnier from University of Amsterdam. He will present the following paper:

Transgender, Shifting Morality and the Bifocality of Culture


Abstract
In recent decades, Euro-American NGOs concerned with human rights, particularly gendered and sexual, have operationalized in the Global South a liberatory politics predicated on the conversion of same-sex practices into identities that are legible through Western eyes. Joseph Massad has provocatively argued that, far from freeing anyone, this politics has authorized new local forms of structural repression. In Tonga, all social, personal, and sexual projects are deployed in the context of a “bifocality” associated with the profound instability of the local that diasporic dispersal has engen-dered since the 1960s. All actions are backgrounded by realms of reality of differing scale, which agents constantly negotiate intersubjectively. The transgender are particularly attuned to this bifo-cality, through which they contest local moralities by claiming that their practices should be evaluat-ed against certain aspects of a cosmopolitan context associated with NGO discourses of HIV preven-tion. While the privileged are particularly adept at appropriating this discourse, it has also opened up new forms of experience for the less privileged, affecting sexual, personal, and social subjectivities. Yet bifocality has also introduced Pentecostal and Mormon moralities that are equally cosmopolitan and liberatory, but lead to radically divergent solutions. Transgender identities in Tonga are being transformed by global discourses, including HIV prevention efforts and new forms of Christianity. All discourses are liberatory and embed transgender identities in global flows of morality, but they have radically different consequences. The transnational circulation of discourse is constituted by a complex array of positions and agents that complicate what is local, what is global, and everything else in between, and requires a much more subtle understanding of these dynamics that Massad offers.


Bionote
Niko Besnier is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, a position he has held since 2005. He has previously taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Yale University, and Victoria University of Wellington. His recent research concerns the construction of gender, sexuality, and the body at the convergence of global and local forces. With funding from the European Research Council, he is currently directing a five-year multi-sited project on the transnational circulation of elite athletes in three sports. Previous publications have addressed topics in political, psychological, and linguistic anthropology, including gossip, conflict, marginality, emotions, personhood, religion, and exchange. His research is based on extensive fieldwork in Western Polynesia and Japan. His most recent books are Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics (Hawai'i, 2009), On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation (Stanford, 2011), and Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders (co-edited with Kalissa Alexeyeff, Hawai’i, in press).

All interested are welcome!