Pozvánka
Česká asociace pro sociální antropologii
a
Masarykova česká sociologická společnost
ve spolupráci s
Fakultou humanitních studií UK
Vás srdečně zvou na
157. GELLNEROVSKÝ SEMINÁŘ
Gellnerovský seminář založen Jiřím Musilem a Petrem Skalníkem v roce 1998
který se bude konat
ve středu 27. dubna 2016 od 16:30 hod.
v New York University, Praha 1,
Malé náměstí 2, 4. poschodí, místnost Masaryk
Vystoupí
Prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes
University of California, Berkeley
na téma
Anthropology of Evil
Yasar ABU-GHOSH, v.r., Zdeněk UHEREK, v.r., Alena MILTOVÁ, v.r.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
is the Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology and the chair of the Doctoral Program in Medical Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology of UC Berkeley. Her long-standing influence on the discipline has been paved by a number of transformative research agendas, her investigation of controversial topics and provocative writing style. She has inquired into topics ranging from AIDS and human rights in Cuba, death squads and the extermination of street kids in Brazil, the Catholic Church, clerical celibacy, and child sex abuse, to the repatriation of the brain of a famous Yahi Indian, Ishi to the Pit River people of Northern California. Her most recent research is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global traffic in humans for their organs. Her examination of structural and political violence, of what she calls „small wars and invisible genocides“ has allowed her to develop a so-called ‚militant‘ anthropology, which has been broadly applied to medicine, psychiatry, and to the practice of anthropology. She best known for her ethnographies Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (2001, Berkeley: University of California Press) investigating schizophrenia among rural Irish bachelors, and Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (1993, Berkeley: University of California Press) portraying the plight of motherhood in times of high infant mortality among the poor in Brazil. She is also the co-editor of agenda setting Commodifying Bodies (with Loïc Wacquant, 2003, London: Sage), and of a comprehensive anthology Violence in War and Peace: an Anthology (with Philippe Bourgois, 2003, London and Malden, Mass: Basil Blackwell). She is also the co-founder (with Lawrence Cohen) and Director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project which since 1999 unravels the global traffic in human organs.
Anthropology of Evil
Evil is not an intuitive anthropological topic. As our discipline is based on epistemological openness and a deep respect and reserve against moral judgment in the face of strangers whose values, beliefs and practices might be radically different from our own. For good reason, anthropologists are bloodhounds on the scent of the good in studying cultural and moral worlds that are often stigmatized, misrecognized, and deeply misunderstood. Nonetheless, ‘culture’ can be a fetish and cultural and moral relativism is best seen as a necessary first step, a methodological tool that allows us to engage with people, societies, and cultures whose views of the human, the good life, and the spirit world deviate from ‘our’ own. It need not end there. After setting up the complex chessboard, anthropologists need to play the game. I will argue that there are some common understandings of what constitutes radical evil, drawing on ethnological, ethnographic, ontological, psychological, philosophical theodicies and homodicies.