Given the renewed scholarly attention to time and temporality, we present a reading list on the anthropology of time.

Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.

How can we imagine communities that are not shaped by the human superiority? Who are we in the light of eco-critical imaginaries? What constitutes us? Who are the others that are to be included in our community?

This two-day online symposium seeks to address the aforementioned questions by engaging the dialogue between philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology and art. It will take place on 17 & 18 September 2020. The symposium will be held in English, fully streamed online, participation is free.

Programme

17 SEPTEMBER, Thursday

11:00—11:15 Opening & Welcome Speeches: Rimvydas Petrauskas (Rector of Vilnius University); Jonas Dagys (Director of the Institute of Philosophy, Vilnius University), Kristupas Sabolius (organizer, Institute of Philosophy, Vilnius University).

MORNING SESSION Moderated by Daina Habdankaitė

11:15 —12:00 Catherine Malabou (Kingston University / University of California Irvine) Not Mandatory: When Addiction Replaces Law

12:00 —12:45 Vittorio Gallese (University of Parma / Columbia University / Humboldt Universität) The Empathic Body. Embodied Simulation and Experimental Aesthetics

12:45—13:00 Break

13:00—13:45 Kristupas Sabolius (Vilnius University / MIT) We Are Milieus

13:45—14:30 Panel discussion: Catherine Malabou, Vittorio Gallese, Kristupas Sabolius, Scott F. Gilbert, moderated by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

14:30 —15.30 Break

AFTERNOON SESSION Moderated by Ignas Šatkauskas

15:30 —16:15 Rita Šerpytytė (Vilnius University) The Challenge of the Subject in the Face of the Real

16:15 —17:00 Ruslanas Baranovas (Vilnius University) Grammatology and the Sadness of Being Human

17:00—17:45 Chiara Bottici (The New School for Social Research) Rethinking the Human Through the Philosophy of Transindividuality

17:45 —18:30 Panel discussion: Rita Šerpytytė, Ruslanas Baranovas, Chiara Bottici moderated by Catherine Malabou

We are pleased to share a new page of HAR with our readers: Doing the History of Anthropology Online: Resources for COVID-19 and Beyond.

Human evolution was messy, with multiple human species living and interbreeding at the same time, in a convoluted process that eventually led to us. Such is the emerging narrative in anthropology, and it’s a theory now bolstered by three fascinating new studies.

It is no scoop for anyone that many academic disciplines were born in Europe during the Age of Empires. It is certainly the case of Classics and other Antiquity-related specialities. It is, also, the case of Anthropology.

I want to propose an Anthropocene territorialization and a subject-making project in which anthropologists might want to engage. The territory of which I write is a place called Iowa. There are plenty of troubling things about the Anthropocene.

Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Svante Paabo sequenced Neanderthal genes but what does it tell us about modern humans?

To take seriously the concept of the Anthropocene—the idea that we have entered a new epoch defined by humans’ impact on Earth’s ecosystems—requires engagement with global history. Using feminist anthropology, this lecture explores the awkward relations between what one might call “machines of replication”—those simplified ecologies, such as plantations, in which life worlds are remade as future assets—and the vernacular histories in which such machines erupt in all their particularity and go feral in counter-intentional forms. This lecture does not begin with the unified continuity of Man (versus indigenous ontologies; as scientific protocol; etc.), but rather explores contingent eruptions and the patchy, fractured Anthropocene they foster. Anna L. Tsing is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, and the acclaimed author of several books including Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. This Helen Pond McIntyre '48 Lecture was recorded on November 10, 2015 at Barnard College.Cast: BCRW VideosTags: feminist, science, environment, feminism and anthropocene

Note Due to technical issues, Solon Barocas' presentation 'The Alterity of Algorithms' was not recorded.

.Presider Sara M. Watson .Hashmod Ava Kofman

Daniel Rourke: Synthetic Subjects Natalie Kane: Ghost Stories Nick Seaver: Traps: Algorithms and the Anthropology of Technology

Anna Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of Santa Cruz, California and the Nils Bohr professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she heads the Living in the Anthropocene research project.

I am very pleased to have an essay/chapter in This Mess is a Place, a collection on hoarding and clutter, edited, compiled and misfiled by Zoë Mendelson. The book is currently available at Camden Arts Centre, with wider distribution to follow from the very wonderful AND Publishing.

This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter is a limited edition publication, edited/curated by Zoë Mendelson and published by And Publishing.

This publication looks at the onset of hoarding through the voices of clinicians and expands the theme to examine how relationships to objects in space inform a number of fields in ways that can be seen to interrelate and impact upon each other. The idea behind the form of this anthology is that practice and artistic research can co-exist with more clinical and scientific research. It is hoped this will create overlaps and crises of ‘usefulness’ akin to the submersion of materials within a hoard or the pursuit of order within a collection. The publication itself is unbound – illogical and precarious as an object, containing loose leaves, pamphlets and nominal filing systems, gathered together in no particular order. The reader is ultimately responsible for the order (or dis-order) of the piece. Publication date is October 26th 2013.

It includes articles, artworks, interviews and fiction. Alongside This Mess is a Place's own collaborators from psychiatric and archival fields there are contributions of artistic projects from Jim Bay (UK); Michel Blazy (FR); Carrie M Becker (USA); Marjolijn Dijkman (NL); Nat Goodden (UK), Jefford Horrigan (UK); Dean Hughes (UK); Mierle Laderman Ukeles (USA); Robert Melee (USA); Zoë Mendelson (UK); Florence Peake (UK); Michael Samuels (UK); Kathryn Spence (USA); Tomoko Takahashi; Robin Waart (NL); Julian Walker (UK) and Laura White (UK).

The publication contains essays and documents by Dr. Colin Jones (Senior Lecturer/Researcher in Applied Health and Social Sciences, UK); Dr. Haidy Geismar (lecturer in digital anthropology and material culture, US/UK); Jeremy Gill (urban planner and theorist, AUS); Cecilie Gravesen (artist, curator and writer, UK/Den); Dr. Alberto Pertusa (consultant psychiatrist, UK); Daniel Rourke (artist and researcher, UK); Isobel Hunter (archivist and Head of Engagement at the National Archives, UK); Satwant Singh (nurse practitioner and cognitive behavourial therapist, UK); Nina Folkersma (curator and critic, NL); Alberto Duman (artist, writer, UK). A full list of essay titles can be seen here. The publication also includes documentary photography by Paula Salischiker (ARG) and an interview with an anonymous hoarder's daughter

This Video doesn't belong to me. Credit to the owners. I am posting it up for an anthropology class of mine.

Description: Australian scientist Michael Alpers dedicated over 50 years to researching Kuru, an obscure and incurable brain disease unique to the Fore people of New Guinea. Kuru was once thought to be a psychosomatic illness, an infection, a genetic disorder, even a sorcerer's curse, but Alpers' findings pointed to cannibalism as the culprit. Yet a recent discovery has proven to be even more disturbing: the malady is linked to mad cow disease and its human equivalent, variant CJD. With a decades-long incubation period, could a larger outbreak be on its way?

A chorus of smart, modern minds is rising over the hills of anthropology that the ancient Neanderthals of Europe weren't anywhere nearly as dumb, insufferable and unrecognizable as everyone thought all these years. At long last, these creatures who roamed the Continent for hundreds of thousands of years only to become extinct 30,000 years ago under the onslaught of modern humans from Africa are getting a major upgrade by the scientific community.

No more can we say that old Neanderthal -- prototype of shaggy man with absolutely zero smarts -- didn't know what he was doing. And no more can we deny it: They were not a little bit like us but a lot. As Professor David Frayer, Neanderthal expert at the University of Kansas, puts it, with not a little hint of told-you-so scientific glee, "Seemingly with every new journal issue, the gap between Neanderthal and modern human behavior closes."

There are two types of anthropologists: One models himself on the scientist, treating the world as his laboratory, people as his raw data. He mounts surveys, crunches numbers, and, crucially, remains detached and dispassionate throughout the process. He applies for big research grants with “expected outcomes” and “anticipated impact” carefully delineated long before he has gone out into the field. The other kind of anthropologist is more like a religious initiate, participating fully in the culture in which he is placed and intimating that he is then the possessor of some secret knowledge. Like an initiate, he cannot anticipate any “outcomes” before they happen but must simply live in the moment and immerse himself in the local customs and values.

It is this latter tradition of which Michael Taussig, an eminent professor at Columbia University, is one of the greatest exponents. The New York Times has called his work “gonzo anthropology.” He has drunk hallucinatory yagé on the sandy banks of the Putumayo River. He’s cured the sick with the aid of spirits. He’s escaped from guerrillas in a dugout canoe at dawn. Above all, he is interested in individual stories and experiences, unique tales that cannot be reduced to rational explanation or bland report. To read Taussig is to have an adventure in which one can move from Walter Benjamin’s experiments with hashish to American kids’ drawings to that dawn-lit canoe without skipping a beat. His narrative is lyrical, mesmeric.

Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own.

To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.

From Star Trek to SETI, our modern world is constantly imagining possible futures where we dart around the galaxy engaging with bizarre alien races. Denning points out that when people talk about these futures, they often invoke the past. But they frequently seem to have a poor understanding of history.

How did our species come to rule the planet? Rick Potts argues that environmental instability and disruption were decisive factors in the success of Homo sapiens: Alone among our primate tribe, we were able to cope with constant change and turn it to our advantage. Potts is director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program, curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and curator of the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, which opened at that museum last year. He also leads excavations in the East African Rift Valley and codirects projects in China that compare early human behavior and environments in eastern Africa with those in eastern Asia. Here Potts explains the reasoning behind his controversial idea.

In November the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, of which I am a member, met for one and a half days. In preparation for the meeting, we were expected to read a 250-page briefing book. About three pages of that 250-page book were taken up by what the meeting will now be remembered for: a revision of the association's statement on its long-range planning. We did not know it, but those three pages were to set off a short "science war" within anthropology. Now that tempers have died down, we can ask what the controversy shows about the force of the word "science" and about anthropology, a discipline that has always stood at the crossroads of science and the humanities.

Most of the 250 pages, and most of our time in the executive-board meeting, was given over to issues that many of us saw as more urgent than the long-range-planning statement: a detailed review of the association's budget in a time of national recession; 

In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers

A "hacker" is a technologist with a love for computing and a "hack" is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn't mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking -- and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground.