Courses / Module

Why do bad things happen? This seminar explores how people give sense to misfortunes, crises, and disasters. We will explore key terms through which the misfortunate is understood — such as ‘risk,’ ‘disaster,’ ‘emergency,’ and ‘crisis’ — and we will query the social implications of the frameworks of intelligibility often associated with them. Anthropologists have long noted, especially in their studies of witchcraft, that historically- and culturally-specific notions of threat and danger — alongside conventional ways of assessing and attributing blame — shape communities and their political processes. More recently, analyses of expert discourses on ‘risk’ within contemporary forms of governance have yielded fresh insights. For example, today linkages between 'risk' and 'security' may be seen to delimit an emergent global political field: one where technocratic management of crises replaces political debate about inequalities and depredations, where distant threats seem to demand never-ending hyper-vigilance, and where humanitarian interventions seem often to reproduce the asymmetries they are ostensibly meant to ameliorate. Moreover, where prior political thoughtstyles tended to emphasise ‘prevention’ in relation to public health and safety, the contemporary obsession with the catastrophic (e.g., ‘mass destruction,’ ‘mass extinction’) indexes a new logic of ‘preparedness’ in relation to threats of an unimaginable nature. As neoliberal ideology has diminished social commitments to public goods (primary healthcare infrastructure, for example), this restraint has often enough eluded police and military budgets and other guarantors of state sovereignty. Thus, the contemporary critique of powers of ‘emergency’ might locate the cultural logic of ‘crisis’ in relation to the exercise of sovereign power. If sovereign power is exercised through the figure that decides on the exception (the crisis, the emergency), might a sovereign science be embedded in those purveyors of expert knowledge who arrogate to themselves the decision on what is and is not a crisis or what kinds of risks/dangers should most receive attention? (Indeed, ‘to discriminate’ or ‘to judge’ are etymologically linked to ‘crisis.’) These observations yield a series of questions: What are the diverse ideological functions of the language of ‘crisis,’ ‘threat,’ ‘danger,’ ‘risk’? What forms of power inhabit this language? Whose suffering and misfortunes matter most when collective crises are declared? What are the connections between forms of representation of misfortunes and how we respond to them? How do such interventions and responses to crises sometimes magnify the social (or ecological or medical) problems they wish to address? In analysing classic anthropological literature on misfortune and new ethnographic accounts of recent crises and catastrophes, this seminar invites anthropologists reflexively to interrogate and refine the analysis of misfortune and its connection to diverse forms of social order, meaning, power, knowledge, and contestation.