This seminar will be a hybrid event where the speaker will be presenting in-person and the talk will be streamed via zoom. Those who want to attend physically are more than welcome to join us in meeting room 929 at Eilert Sundts hus.
Abstract
The first fact of human life is that we share a common world with others. What kind of world this is, however, is an open question, posed every time we interact with those around us. This talk considers the origins of this openness in what David Graeber, drawing from Marcel Mauss, called “everyday communism”—the elementary expectations of sociality that undergird human relations. In it, I examine interactions between humans and monkeys and devotees and possessed deity mediums in Singapore. In both instances, people attempt to figure out how to share interactional common ground with other-than-human beings. Paradoxically, trying to share a mutual reality facilitates interpretive enclosure, where the ethical openness of common life gives way to stories about control that cede the ground to moral abstractions and ontological essences. In conclusion, I describe how these processes of abstracting control create the conditions in which the state, as a metaphysical abstraction, attains hegemony within social relations but also why this shows us how we might keep communicational commons open.
Bionote
Stuart Earle Strange is Associate Professor of Anthropology, National University of Singapore and Maria Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Institute for Cultural Studies and Asian Language, University of Oslo. He is the author of Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (2021) and has published articles and book chapters on Singapore, Suriname, Maroon communities, multispecies anthropology, and plantations, among other topics.