ASCL Seminar Series: Presence and social obligation: An essay on the share
In a 2015 book, James Ferguson analysed the notion of sharing as a principle of distribution of social protection payments or “cash transfers” in the Global South in general, and in southern Africa in particular. Noting that current schemes of distribution are (like all “social” schemes before them) limited by principles of nation-state membership, he concluded that it may be possible to detect new logics of social obligation emerging that work not according to a logic of citizenship and national membership, but according to a principle of “presence”. This seminar will elaborate this conception and develop a more complete account of how such an understanding of presence might provide a basis both for an expanded sense of social obligation and for more inclusionary forms of politics.
Chair: Prof. Rijk van Dijk, ASCL
James Ferguson is Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor of Anthropology and the Susan Ford Dorsey Director of African Studies at Stanford University. He has done research for many years in southern Africa, including Lesotho, Zambia, and South Africa, and is the author of several books, including Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (2006) and Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (2015).
Date, time and location
16 May 2019
15.30 - 17.00
Pieter de la Courtgebouw / Faculty of Social Sciences, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
Room 1A01
Registration
Posted on 10 December 2018, last modified on 16 May 2019