baobab
Base de données des enseignements et séminaires de l'EHESS

Ce séminaire est composé d’interventions d’anthropologues étrangers, invités à l’EHESS pendant l'année en cours et affiliés à des institutions universitaires étrangères (London School of Economics, universités de Cambridge, de Francfort, de Leiden, etc.). Son objectif est double. D’une part, il doit permettre aux étudiants de master de bénéficier des enseignements d’anthropologues de renom, couvrant un large spectre de thématiques et d’approches. Ceci permet aux étudiants de découvrir les questions qui animent aujourd’hui, dans le reste du monde, l’anthropologie telle qu’elle est en train de se faire. D’autre part, il s'agit de familiariser les étudiants avec la langue anglaise dans un cadre concret de communication scientifique afin de les préparer à l'internationalisation des carrières d'enseignant-chercheur en anthropologie. Les interventions des invités sont en majorité délivrées en anglais et les étudiants sont incités à s'exprimer en anglais.

16 janvier 2019 : introduction (Olivier Allard)

6 février 2019 : Christopher Pinney (UCL, Royaume-Uni), « Photoshop and Democracy in India »

The session will explore the use of Photoshop by the Hindu right in India. It will investigate different theories of photography and ask whether we are really living in the age of "photography after the end of photography". It will be argued that the ‘event’ of photography has so far proved to be surprisingly enduring. The discussion will attempt to show the relevance of visual anthropology for the understanding of contemporary political landscapes.

6 mars 2019 : José Antonio Kelly (UFSC, Brésil), « On the many ways anthropology and mathematics crossover: a few examples »

This lecture explores some of the many ways in which mathematical concepts have been put to use in anthropological analysis. After several years of teaching anthropology it is noticeable that social science students tend to have a considerable aversion to mathematics, a sentiment often instilled during earlier phases of their education. More generally the separation between hard and soft sciences leaves the students of the latter with little interest and knowledge of the former and a general belief or impression of mutual incompatibility. This lecture is not a systematic review of the intellectual cross-over between hard sciences and anthropology, it simply addresses this "intellectual gap" by presenting and discussing some notable examples of mathematical figures deployed by some of the discipline's most prominent representatives, as well as some examples drawn from my own work and imagination. The lecture will cover a long though patchy ground, including the following discussions: 1) Malinowski's "ethnographic measurement" approach vs. structuralism's "engineering" approach to anthropological description; 2) Levi-Strauss' use of transformation groups and a demonstration of how totemism, naturalism and perspectivism can be seen as members of a transformation group; 3) Bateson's use of negative feedback loops in the analysis of the Naven ceremony and a comparison with Leach's analysis of Kachin socio-political swings between gumlao and gumsa models of political organization; 4)  Elements of fractal mathematics and chaos theory as deployed by Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and others like Gruzinski and myself and a demonstration of the "chaos game" in relation to kinship analysis; 5) Schrödinger's cat and Juruna dreams; 6) Amerindian moebius strips.

20 mars 2019 (salle 13) : Bruce Mannheim (Université de Michigan, États-Unis), « For the ethnographer, all translation is radical translation »

Whatever translation is for the anthropologist, it cannot be a mere matter of identifying denotational equivalences-that is, replacing one set of linguistic forms for a denotatum with another; nor a reliance on translation manuals—bilingual dictionaries or bilingual interpreters. These strategies lead to commensuration problems, in which concepts, practices, and institutions have been retrofitted to those of the ethnographer or her translator. I discuss some cases of “culturally core” vocabulary in Southern Quechua that have been grossly distorted by the process of retrofitting them to conceptual frameworks in Spanish, English, and French, and show that under traditional methodologies, these distortions are sociologically unavoidable. I recommend instead, a version of the philosopher W.V.O. Quine’s radical translation—proposed in the 1960s, updated to take in new research in anthropology, in linguistics, and in cognitive science.

3 avril 2019 : Don Kulick (Uppsala University, Suède), « When Animals Talk Back »

This talk charts the range of ways in which humans (psychologists, sociologists, pet owners, pet psychics, people with disabilities, and so on) have attempted to communicate with animals. I will discuss what these perspectives tell us about how the condition of vulnerability might be imagined and engaged with in ways that extend beyond seeing vulnerability as necessarily linked to resistance and agency.

17 avril 2019 : Carlos Mondragon (Colegio de México, Mexique), « Anticipating Catastrophe, Producing New Worlds: Environmental Policy and Indigenous Knowledge in the 21st Century »

This conference will offer an overview of the relationship between the anthropological study of local knowledge, indigenous worlds, and climate policy over the past thirty years. First, it will map the broad trends that have defined this relationship, and second it will argue that the nature of climate change, of the environment and of alterity (indigeneity) has itself changed in the process. In the final years of the 20th century there were two processes that framed environmental anthropology and climate policy design: 1) the radical critique of the nature-culture divide (Descola,  Latour, Viveiros, Hviding, Sahlins, and others), which forced new theories and concepts for approaching the lifeworlds of other peoples, and 2) the recognition that climate policy was the same as development policy – it did not take indigenous and local knowledge seriously. These two processes became entangled with a third trend: the increasing public and political awareness of the threat of global warming. Over the years, these three factors have combined to produce an anthropology of climate change and a renewed anthropology of indigenous knowledge which have a powerful effect on our production of the world and the planet. Today, we recognize the world as an emergent, dynamic and plural phenomenon; we also approach climate change in ways that we did not imagine before, with concepts like adaptation and resilience which have a powerful effect on climate policy design and interventions. The argument I will offer is that we do not inhabit in the Anthropocene, so much as we are producing it: climate change will not change the world, because we have been changing the world in response to how we imagine climate change. This talk will try to offer an idea of the kind of world that we are anticipating in the process of producing it.