Lecture
Lunch lecture: ‘Geo’-Politics and Animist Social Contracts in the New Himalayas
- Date
- Thursday 9 February 2023
- Time
- Location
- Pieter de la Court Building
- Room
- 3a.29
Modern geopolitics is dominantly associated with states and their often antagonistic interests. This paper explores what happens when we take the original Greek meaning of ‘geo’ – the physical earth, relating to the earth, mother earth, earth goddess, Gaia – as the gravity of our analysis. When supplemented with the suffix ‘politics’, this originary geopolitics relates the integrality of the physical, political, and spiritual worlds. In this talk I argue and illustrate ethnographically that this version of geopolitics resonates with a range of indigenous Himalayan communities, and offers a non-anthropocentric critique and alternative to utilitarian narratives of the state-capital.
Bio Jelle Wouters
Jelle Wouters is a social anthropologist who carried out long-term ethnographic and historical research among the upland and tribal Nagas in India’s generally lesser known Northeastern Region, writing about insurgency, violence, vernacular politics, capitalism, resource-extraction, and social history. His main research area and focus today are environmental humanities, climate change, water, and human-animal-plant entanglements in Bhutan, and Highland Asia more widely.
Organisation
Organised by the Asia cluster of the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.