Munro Lecture - Professor Marisol de la Cadena: 'Nature but not only. Stories from the anthropo-not-seen'

This is event has now passed, but you can view a recording below.

Accelerated consumption of minerals, oil and energy as well as the development of infrastructure to make them available for consumption, has led to an unprecedented destruction of what we know as nature. Joining protests in defense of the environment some indigenous collectives have made public that what is being destroyed is other-than-human entities, crucial participants in world-making practices that confuse the division between nature and humanity. Presenting the idea that nature is not only such, the talk discusses an emergent ‘politics across divergence,’ or the possibility for alliances that require becoming through what Isabelle Stengers has called “interests in common that that are not the same interests.”

Free event, everyone welcome. Please note that this event may be recorded.

Professor de la Cadena's biography

Professor de la CadenaI was trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England France and the US. She locates her work at several interfaces: those between STS and non-STS, between major and minor politics (and what escapes both,) between history and the a-historical, and between world anthropologies and the anthropologies of worlds. In all these areas, her concern is the relationship between concepts and methods, and interfaces as analytical sites. Most specifically, she is interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between what we call theory and the empirical, and can indicate the limits of both opening them up to what they cannot grasp. Emerging at the crossroads of worlds, ethnographic concepts can work with their philosophical and theoretical counterparts to, recursively, indicate their limits and open up possibilities for a practice of anthropological ‘not knowing:’ an epistemic practice that does not want to conquer—and thus assimilate--the relation from which it works.