Event overview
'Ecological Inheritance, Generational Conflict, and Dispossession' with Kath Weston, University of Virginia
We are delighted to announce our final seminar in our Anthropology in the Anthropocene series this session
"What sort of world are we leaving to our children?" “Why have you not taken better care of the environment? You are passing a ruined planet on to us!” These are rhetorical claims, though hardly idle ones, that have become commonplace in discussions of climate change and ecological damage. On both sides of a putative generational divide, a notion of ecological inheritance frames speculative futures, as well as diagnoses of what currently ails an Earth now conceived on a planetary scale. This talk examines the revival of a transmission model of inheritance in environmental politics and everyday encounters across North America, offering as illustrative evidence a series of vignettes centered on four pieces of “material culture”: a plastic bag, a sparrow’s nest, a bumper sticker, and a totem pole. What assumptions about possession, ownership, responsibility, and succession inform the trope of bequeathing an ecologically compromised world? What sorts of exclusions are embedded in depictions of ecological inheritance for those who already apprehend themselves as dispossessed? Does it matter that ecological inheritance presents itself discursively as a kinship-mediated legacy that, like debt bondage, can neither be renounced nor refused? Theoretically speaking, to the degree that this discourse imagines ecological inheritance as a strictly human enterprise, with only humans positioned to give or receive, what does this say about the perpetuation of split nature/culture thinking and the limitations of recent ontological critiques?
Kath Weston Is Professor of Anthropology at Virginia and her books include:
2017 - Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Duke.
2008 - Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor. Beacon Press.
2002 - Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age. Routledge.
1998 - Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science. Routledge.
1997 - Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Beacon Press.
1996 - Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins. Columbia University Press.
1982 - The Apprenticeship and Blue Collar System. California State Department of Education.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Jun 2018 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
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