Stories from the Anthropos-not-seen

Stories from the Anthropos-not-seen 
September 29, 2022
5:00-6:30pm
Cafe 58 in Irvine Auditorium

How can we tell stories with and from the “Anthropos-not-seen”? Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser engage in a hybrid dialogue where they discuss their proposal to “uncommon nature” and the Anthropocene. They will converse about ways to listen for the silences and exclusions too often perpetuated even within progressive agendas for climate and environmental justice.

Register here! 

This hybrid event will be recorded and shared on PPEH's public channels.

Mario Blaser is a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He  is the author of Storytelling Globalization from the Paraguayan Chaco and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2010) and co-editor of A world of Many World (Duke University Press 2018);  Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for the Global Age (University of British Columbia Press, 2010) and In the Way of Development: Indigenous peoples, Life Projects and Globalization (Zed Books 2004). His upcoming book Not About the Anthropocene: An Essay of Political Ontology for Life Projects examines the challenges of articulating heterogeneous life projects under the shadow of discussions on the Anthropocene and the Common. Life projects embody ‘small stories’ about the good life and in this sense can be contrasted with the ‘big stories’ through which notions like Anthropocene and the Common tend to be associated. In effect, discussions around these two concepts tend to be haunted by the image of the Blue Planet as a totality that functions as the horizon of relevance for politics. Blaser’s research explores the proposal that life projects index other politics which opens new vistas to the problems that both debates on the Anthropocene and the Common purport to address.

Marisol de la Cadena, born in Peru, trained as an anthropologist in Peru, England, France and USA. She locates her work at the crossroads between STS and what exceeds science. Interested in “ethnographic concepts,” her most book is Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015.) With Mario Blaser she edited “A World of Many Worlds” (2018) with contributions to “Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Dialogues towards the reconstitution of worlds” a Sawyer Seminar held at UC Davis (2012-2013.) She currently works in Colombian farms on cow terraforming practices.

This is the first in a four part series exploring our annual topic Listening for the Anthropos-not-seen, directed by Dr. Kristina Lyons.