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Upcoming Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures
LEWIS HENRY MORGAN LECTURE SERIES
OCTOBER 21, 2009
DECLARATIONS OF DEPENDENCE: LABOR, PERSONHOOD, AND WELFARE IN SOUTH AFRICA AND BEYOND
James Ferguson, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology
Stanford UniversityProfessor Ferguson's research has been conducted in Lesotho and Zambia, and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. A central theme running through it has been a concern with the political, broadly conceived, and with the relation between specific social and cultural processes and the abstract narratives of "development" and "modernization" through which such processes have so often been known and understood. Professor Ferguson's most recent book, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. The essays that make up the book address a range of specific topics, ranging from structural adjustment, the crisis of the state, and the emergence of new forms of government-via-NGO, to the question of the changing social meaning of "modernity" for colonial and postcolonial urban Africans. They converge, however, around the question of "Africa" as a place in a wider categorical ordering of the world, and they use this question as a way to think about such large-scale issues as globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice.
Professor Ferguson is now beginning a new research project in South Africa, exploring the emergence of new problematics of poverty and social policy under conditions of neoliberalism.
PUBLIC LECTURE
October 21, 2009, 7:00 PM
Lander Auditorium, Hutchison HallReception Following
Green Carpet Lounge, Hutchison HallFor more information please contact Ro Ferreri at
585-275-8614 or by e-mail: anthro@mail.rochester.edu
