Inaugural Lectures in Social Anthropology

Inaugural lectures Friday 6 September from 2 pm in the Chr. Hansen Auditorium, Building 34 at CSS. The lectures will be in English and open to the public. The doors will be closed five minutes before the beginning of each lecture.

From the left: Morten Axel Pedersen, Tine Gammeltoft and Henrik Vigh

This year the Department of Anthropology has appointed three professors. It is therefore our pleasure to invite all interested to a joint inauguration event held by the three new professors:

2 pm – 2.40 pm:

An Anthropology of Belonging: A Post-Post Humanist Perspective on Subjectivity
Lecture by Tine Gammeltoft , Professor at the Department of Anthropology

Tine Gammeltoft reflects on the ways in which advancing biomedical technologies become sites for the formation of ethical subjectivity, confronting us with basic questions concerning the limits and nature of the human.

Drawing on ethnography from Vietnam and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Tine Gammeltoft argues that by approaching people’s engagements with biomedical technologies as matters of belonging rather than freedom, we may attain new understandings of human lives and aspirations.

3 pm – 3.40 pm:

Precarity and Social Invisibility
Lecture by Henrik Vigh , Professor with special obligations at the Department of Anthropology

Based on fieldwork in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, this lecture illuminates the manner in which people orientate themselves toward hidden dangers and invisible perils in situations of long-term insecurity.

Henrik Vigh looks at the social effects generated by long term conflict and ties the empirical findings into a more general discussion of precarity and invisibility in social life and theory.

4 pm – 4.40 pm:

Taking Things too Seriously
Lecture by Morten Axel Pedersen , Professor at the Department of Anthropology

This lecture engages with one of anthropology's oldest problems, namely what to do with words and deeds that, from the ethnographer's vantage, seem false and/or wrong. To what extent are anthropologists meant to think along with their informants' - is the capacity "to take things seriously" a defining trademark of the discipline?

Based on examples from Mongolia and Mozambique, and a historical account of how anthropologists have always sought to take their informants seriously, Pedersen shows how the recent "turn to ontology" offers a novel solution to this problem by deliberately taking certain things people say more seriously than themselves.  

The Chr. Hansen Auditorium is located at The Centre for Health and Society (CSS), Øster Farimagsgade 5, DK-1353 Copenhagen K. The doors will be closed five minutes before the beginning of each lecture. See a map of the CSS-area.

After the lectures the Department will host a reception.