[Sci-tech-public] Fri., Dec. 3 Sensing the Unseen @ MIT - "The Occult and Uncanny: Governing"

[Amberly Steward]

Please join us this Friday for the 4th meeting of "Sensing the Unseen," a
seminar series to discuss current scholarship on the sensory and media modes
that people employ to access realms of existence and experience outside the
immediately visible. 

All seminar meetings are free and open to the public - no registration is
required. 

The Occult and Uncanny: <http://web.mit.edu/unseen/species/occult.html>
Governing
Friday, December 3, 2:30 - 5:00 PM  
@ MIT 56-114 (Whitaker Building #56 <http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=56> , Room
114)

Speakers: Adam Ashforth and Bruce Grant 
Discussants: Mary Steedly (Anthropology, Harvard), Mark Auslander
(Anthropology, Brandeis)
 
Adam Ashforth - Spiritual Insecurity in the Democratic State: A Relational
Realist Approach 
The promise of security from harm for its citizens, coupled with the
entitlement to seek justice in response to harm, is a foundation of
legitimacy in modern states. For people living in a world with witches,
sorcerers, demons, evil spirits, and other invisible powers, however, state
institutions offer little in the way of justice and security in the face of
malevolence. This paper examines recent efforts by communities in rural
Malawi to secure themselves from bloodsuckers rumored to be working for the
state president to provide blood for foreign white Satanists. It outlines a
relational realist framework for analyzing spiritual insecurity and shows
how the politics of everyday relations with invisible forces shape practices
of politics and government at the level of the state, with particular
implications for democratic governance. 
  
Adam Ashforth teaches in the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at
the University of Michigan. He is the author of three books, including
Madumo, a Man Bewitched (Chicago, 2000) and Witchcraft, Violence and
Democracy in South Africa (Chicago, 2005). He is currently working with a
group of Malawians who have been chronicling everyday responses to the AIDS
epidemic since the turn of the century. 


Bruce Grant - Shrines and Sovereigns: Competing Modes of Governance and its
Limits in the Former Soviet Union 
Through interviews and archival readings, this paper follows the social life
of a religious shrine in rural Azerbaijan over the twentieth century.
Founded to honor a regionally famous Muslim holy man from Arabia, this
small, rather commonplace mausoleum, and the community of faithful that
serve it, have passed from ignominy to heroism, and back to ignominy again
across changing political economies. Retrospective accounts of the shrine's
life under Soviet rule offer a telling window onto larger questions of how
average citizens in the Soviet countryside perceived socialist rule itself.
By exploring practices and beliefs around the site, I show how accounts of
mystical mobilities, miraculous rebel leaders, and the "near-death"
experience of religion under Soviet power shed light on competing logics of
autonomy, governance, and sovereignty in this long-contested world area. 

Bruce Grant teaches anthropology at New York University. He is the author of
two books - In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas
(Princeton 1995) and The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of
Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009) - as well as co-editor
of the recently released Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke
2010). He serves as President-Elect of the Association for Slavic, East
European, and Eurasian Studies. 

....
A Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures to be held at MIT in
2010-2011, "Sensing the Unseen" is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
and hosted by MIT Anthropology. Our website provides more details, including
upcoming seminars:  http://web.mit.edu/unseen/ 

Maps & directions to the "Sensing the Unseen" seminar can be found here:
http://web.mit.edu/unseen/directions.html
Sign up to receive email reminders about upcoming seminars:
https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/unseen_list 

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