Moral Horizons
The University of Melbourne, 1-4 December 2015
The Australian Anthropological Society 2015 conference, Moral Horizons, was hosted by the Anthropology Program at the University of Melbourne from 1-4 December. The aim of the conference was to create a dialogue around moralities, both as experienced by community members in the diverse ethnographic settings in which we work, and within our own anthropological practices. The 501 registered delegates enthusiastically participated in this dialogue, with over 340 papers delivered across the 44 panels. In addition to strong representation of scholars from across Australia, we were delighted to host delegates from 18 nations, demonstrating the increasingly international reach of our engagements.
Scintillating keynotes delivered by eminent global scholars Michael Lambek, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Annelise Riles traversed diverse theoretical and geographic terrain: from the shifting horizons of practical judgement in Mayotte marriages; to death squads, war crimes and organ trafficking as evidence of evil as an intrinsic aspect of the human; to comfort women and the potential of a conflict of laws approach for dealing with the poly-temporalities of human rights abuses. Notwithstanding the diversity of approaches, common threads emerged in the significance attributed to temporal dimensions of moral reasoning, and the global nature of contemporary ethical questions.
The two provocative plenary sessions, convened by Ghassan Hage and Gerhard Hoffstaedter respectively, pushed us to question the continuing impacts of colonialism in the societies in which we live and work, while considering the role anthropologists can and should play as advocates, teachers, researchers and public intellectuals. Well-attended auxiliary sessions, from the Native Title and Reconciliation Action Plan Workshops through to the Postgrad sessions, targeted such questions to more specific and applied ends. The conference itself facilitated considerable public engagement via some 1,750 #moralhorizons tweets that reached over 1.5 million people. In addition, feedback from panel convenors indicates that several edited volumes and journal special issues will be developed from conference panels.
More from the conference website: Moral Horizons
Keynote Speakers
Moral Horizons: Marriage in Mayotte
Michael Lambek, University of Toronto
December 2, 2015
Michael Lambek holds a BA from McGill and PhD from the University of Michigan. He has taught since 1978 at the University of Toronto and half time for 3 years (2006-2008) at the LSE. Since 2006 he has held the Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Ethical Life at the University of Toronto Scarborough and since 2012 chaired the undergraduate anthropology department there. He is the author of two anthropological monographs based on fieldwork on the island of Mayotte in the western Indian Ocean and one from fieldwork in northwest Madagascar. He edited or co-edited 8 further books, including Tense Past; Illness and Irony; Ordinary Ethics; and both A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion and A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Perhaps of greatest regional relevance in Australia are Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia (1998, with Andrew Strathern) and Ecology and the Sacred: Engaging the Anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport (2001, with Ellen Messer). In addition, he has just published The Ethical Condition: Essays on action, person, and value (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and co-authored Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (together with Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keene; Hau Books, 2015).
Engaging Evil: Neocannibalism and Military-Terrorist Necropolitics
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, University of California, Berkeley
December 3, 2016
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Refracted Time: From Historicity to Legal Technique in the “Comfort Women” Controversy
Annelise Riles, Cornell Law School
December 4, 2015
Annelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, and she serves as Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. Her work focuses on the dimensions of transnational laws, markets and culture that seem to elude ethnographic inquiry on the one hand, and the unique contributions of anthropology to contemporary legal, political and epistemological inquiry on the other. Her most recent book, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago Press 2011) is based on ten years of fieldwork among regulators and lawyers in the Japanese derivatives markets. Her first book, The Network Inside Out, an ethnography of transnational feminist activism from the vantagepoint of Fiji, won the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit for 2000-2002. Her second book, Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law, is a cultural history of Comparative Law presented through its canonical figures. Her third book, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, brings together lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians of science to consider practices of documentation alongside the question of anthropology’s methodological future. Riles also founded and directs Meridian 180, a global community of public intellectuals deploying ethnographic methods to address the politics of the contemporary moment in the Asia-Pacific region.