Research Seminar Series: Jason Throop

On Abiding and Bearing

Presenter: Jason Throop, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Jason Throop specializes in the fields of medical and psychological anthropology. Dr. Throop has conducted extensive ethnographic research on human subjectivity, empathy, morality, and suffering in cultural context.  Spending more than 19 months engaged in ethnographic research on the cultural and moral configuration of experiences of pain and suffering in Yap (Waqab), Throop has sought to explore how Yapese orientations to suffering can inform a number of ongoing debates in philosophy and social theory broadly defined. He is the author of the book Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (2010, University of California Press), and co-editor of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (2010, Stanford University Press) and The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (2011, Berghahn Press)

Abstract: Thinking through a range of responses to the specter of climate catastrophe, this talk will examine two foundational forms of being-in-the-world that remain below the threshold of hope: abiding and bearing. As foundational attunements to the world, abiding and bearing are modes of being that disclose possibilities to keep going, even in the face of upheavals and crises that may tear our otherwise hoped for future projects and plans to the ground. Protentional, not yet fully expectational, these two modes of worldly attunement lie between the radical passivity of pathos and the effortful enactment of endurance. With etymological roots that link abiding to continuing, remaining, waiting, dwelling, and tolerating, and bearing to carrying on, bringing forth, birthing, producing, and sustaining, these two modes of attunement disclose an ongoing perpetuation of being, even in the context of situations where hope in its various, and varying, manifestations is simply no longer possible.