Life in an Age of Death
James Cook University, Cairns Campus, 4-7 December 2018
During the first decades of the twenty-first century, the proliferation of life as a generative possibility has become marked by the spectre of death, closure, denial and ends. Ours is an era of precarity, extinction, militarised inequality, a seemingly boundless war on terror, the waning legitimacy of human rights, a rising consciousness of animal cruelty and consumer complicity in killing and suffering, and the global closure of decolonial and socialist windows of emancipation. Artificial intelligence and post-human technology-flesh interventions have become sources of existential threat to be secured against, rather than means of freeing, or otherwise expanding life. Mbembe (2003) first developed the notion of necropolitics in relation to ‘assemblages of death’, zones where technology, economy and social structures bind together to reproduce patterns of extreme violence. Following Foucault, he envisaged a distribution of the world into life zones and death zones. While we can readily identify zones of life and death on these terms, the imaginaries of death have increasingly colonised life zones.
This conference seeks to embrace this moment in history in all its roiling complexity, challenge, and specificity. It asks what accounts for this current interest in the spectre of Death in the anthropological imagination? What sorts of life—social, cultural, technological, creative—emerge in spaces pregnant with death and other life-ending spectres? What new horizons of fear, hope and possibility emerge? What kinds of new social formations, subjectivities and cultural imaginaries? What social and cultural forms might an affirmative biopolitics, where the power of life is regained from the spectre of death, take? What new strategies of engagement, activism and refusal?
What can anthropology specifically bring to these emergent and often-interdisciplinary zones of urgency? How might our methods, theories and orientations be re-tooled and re-energised for these shadowed times?
More from the conference website: Life in an Age of Death
The conference program is available HERE.
Keynote Speakers
Ethnographic responsibility in the age of depletion
Lucas Bessire, University of Oklahoma
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Lucas Bessire is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. His work addresses extraction, power, and genre across the Americas, in sites that include the Gran Chaco, the Great Plains and the Arctic. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014), creator of the Ayoreo Video Project (2017) and recipient of various awards and fellowships. While a 2018-19 Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, he is completing an autoethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the North American High Plains. The book project charts how people inhabit the imminent ends of groundwater in order to reflect more broadly on the defining conundrums of our political present and the potentials of ethnography to cross divides.
Abstract
How might ethnographic knowledge suggest ways beyond the conjoined crises of ecologies, democracies and hermeneutics that define the contemporary? To explore this question, the talk offers an experimental ethnographic account of aquifer depletion on the U.S. Great Plains. It charts how depletion accretes over generations to become a porous threshold of belonging indistinguishable from partisan and epistemic divides. In doing so, it offers a wider reflection on ethnography’s capacity to illuminate anti-essentialist approaches to the social worlds emerging along frontiers of destruction and change.
The end: what it means when a language dies
Don Kulick, Uppsala University
Thursday December 6, 2018
Don Kulick is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he directs a multidisciplinary research program called Engaging Vulnerability. He has conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and Scandinavia, and has written and edited more than a dozen books on topics that range from the lives of transgender prostitutes in Brazil to the anthropology of fat. His most recent book, A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea, will be published by Algonquin Books in 2019.
Abstract
Don Kulick will speak about the impending demise of Tayap, a Papuan language spoken in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, that currently has less than fifty active speakers. He has worked with Tayap and its speakers for over thirty years, and will describe the social and linguistic processes that have led to its dissolution. He will also ask what the death of Tayap means: in general terms, in relation to the current wave of language extinctions that are occurring across the globe; in specific terms, in relation to the people who are losing their ancestral tongue; and also in terms of how anthropologists and linguists might engage with a phenomenon like language death in our work.
Is property a person? Slavery, prostitution, sex robots, cyborgs and the new constitution of property relations
Kathleen Richardson, De Montfort University
Friday December 7, 2018
Kathleen Richardson is a Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Kathleen is also the founder of the Campaign Against Sex Robots – a campaign developing a feminist abolitionist perspective on robots and AI. She has carried out anthropological fieldwork in labs in Europe and the US. Her books include An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015), Challenging Sociality: An Anthropology of Robots, Autism, and Attachment (2018) and Sex Robots: The End of Love (late 2018).
Abstract
This talk will explore recent discussions in the European Union to ascribe ‘robot personhood’ to machines and other arguments for extending the juridical legal franchise to include robots and AI as ‘persons’. Personhood as means to legally extend rights to nonhumans is celebrated as a way of abolishing hierarchy, not just between humans (women, working men and people of colour), but of creating a new field where artificial agents are given rights and recognitions. Is this marking a new culture of life where humans and nonhumans coexist as equivalent beings? Or does it mark a culture of death where all are encased in an ‘Iron Cage’ held together under a new constitution of property relations? Charting the rise of the person as a legal concept, to how it has changed over time, included and excluded, and to what political and economic ends. The Western political franchise began exclusively with white male property owners in a hierarchical system, but over time, legal personhood was extended to other categories of human, including white non-property-owning males, freed slaves and women. Persons, can be corporations, and rivers, but can they be robots and AI programs? I will explore contemporary liminal spaces – such as the commercial prostitution industry – where bodies are not fully civil, but also property and the connections of these practices with the rise of artefacts as substitute intimate others, where person and property become interchangeable.