[Sci-tech-public] Anthropology Special Talk - Tomorrow

[Irene Hartford]

Hello everyone,

We hope you can join us for tomorrow's special talk.  Details are below.




Friday, February 7th at 12:00 Noon in E53-354

NICHOLAS D’AVELLA, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society
University of California, Berkeley

Ecologies of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina

Abstract:  In this talk I describe an ecological approach to investment in Argentina, which involves seeing investments as part of an emergent web of relations among constitutive and constituting parts.  Such a sensibility is an important feature of Argentine economic life, in which no investment is treated like any other.  Care about attributing equivalence and attention to the relationality of investments was also central to how people worked to save their savings in the aftermath of the Argentine economic crisis of 2001.  However, Argentines are not just invested in dollars and pesos, bank accounts and cash; they are also invested in their economic past.  As a result, the history of Argentine economic life is under a constant process of (re)narration, as Argentines reflect upon their rocky economic past in films, memoir, comic monologues, and stories told among family and friends.  I follow Argentines in attending to the past as a means to engage current ecologies of investment, paying particular attention to the history of currency and banking in Argentina, which together helped produce a boom in real estate investment in the years following the crisis.  I suggest how thinking in this way about investments could be useful for looking beyond global descriptions of the economy.








Irene Hartford
Sr. Administrative Assistant
MIT Anthropology Program
E53-335, 30 Wadsworth St.
Cambridge, MA 02142
617-452-2837
Ihart at mit.edu




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sci-tech-public/attachments/20140206/4e181efb/attachment-0001.htm