History and Theory (inactive)

This meeting has been postponed until the fall. We look forward to seeing you then!

Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014,) Part II, "Geneaologies of Variation: the Case of Morning Glory Flowers" (pp. 95-158.) Continuing discussion of questions raised about Part I: 

• We talked quite a bit about "Singing the Morning Glory Blues," the utopian "fictional science" narrative in Chapter 3. It will be interesting to compare the shiningly resolved Saraswati Institute to the collaborative scientific experiment that Subramaniam reports on in Part II.
• Many parallels struck us between Subramaniam and Tsing: the careful use of storytelling as method, multispecies/ naturecultural narratives, ghosts and hauntings, and the search for optimism amidst destruction.
• Subramaniam, like Tsing, is attached to optimism. We wonder about how optimism works here. Is this "feminist reconstructive project" plausible (and does it need to be?)
• Given that even seemingly hopeful, positive visions of diversity and variation (like Dobzhansky's, or George Ball's in Part II) are caught up in the same eugenic script, where are the spaces for reconstruction?
• Ghosts of bloody and violent victims of eugenics, haunting a field of morning glories. These ghosts recall Tsing's hauntings, and yet they are very different. Does Tsing's materialism make the difference?
• Subramaniam describes forms of recursion on multiple scales: in the history of evolutionary biology, in the transit of 'eugenic scripts' to and from science and politics, in the design of biological experiments (shaped by and reinforcing these same scripts,) and in her biography as a feminist scientist and scholar. The same scripts haunt each of these stories. What about scale? Where does the recursive loop start and stop? 

Chapters from Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014): Preface/Introduction and Chapters 1-3, through p.91. The material is varied in style, method and content: we invite you to attach to the chapter(s) that resonate with you. We look forward to our discussion!
Abstract: "In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explored how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology.Subramaniam revealed the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field."

We discussed the Introduction and Chapter 5 ("Leaks") of Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2017).
The Introduction can be found on the Duke UP website, https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6269-2_601.pdf
An early version of Chapter 5 (published in Public Culture 2015, 27(2): 305-330. can be found here: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/anthropology/sites/www.sas.upenn.edu.anthropol...
For further interest, see a series of videos on water in Mumbai, produced by Anand and a Mumbai collective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3P9ePmfDk0&index=4&list=PLC85C8B62BEBFC6FD

NOTE SPECIAL DATE
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton UP, 2015.) Focusing on pp. 131-144, 155-163 and 205-225. 

NOTE SPECIAL TIME
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton UP, 2015.) Chapters 1-6, through p.121.
 

Note Special Day and Time
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Chapters 4, 6, 6.5, 7 and Conclusion.
We continued conversations around anti-stadial theories of history, shatter zones, friction, political agency and the objects of history, capture, enclosure, fugitivity and refuge. And whether eating roots is more fun than growing grain.
For those who were unable to join us for discussion of the first chapters, you can catch up on essential points in this 20 -minute recording, in which Scott discusses his thesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwrUsib4vU.

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 1-97. If you are pressed for time, we will focus on the Introduction and Chapter 3.
As a supplement, you may find useful this 20-minute discussion of the book produced by Yale University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwrUsib4vU

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies:  A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Chapters 1 & 2.

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016): 1-8, 30-57, 99-103.

The group discussed two readings:

Bill Brown, “Overture” and “Coda” from Other Things (Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015);

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.

The group discussed two articles: Marisol De La Cadena, "Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond 'Politics,'" Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (May 1, 2010): 334-70 and Tim Ingold, "Materials against Materiality," Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (June 2007): 1-16.

This year's theme for the History & Theory Working Group is "ontology and materiality." They began with a discussion of two essays: Greg Anderson's "Retrieving the Lost Worlds of the Past: The Case for an Ontological Turn" and Paul Roth's "Ways of Pastmaking."

The group discussed Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995): 43-76, and John Zammito, “History/Philosophy/Science: Some Lessons for Philosophy of History,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 390-413. Some group members also read Serres, “Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales Saw...” in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982): 84-97.

The group will discuss Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press, 2011), Ch 1 & 2. If time permits, members are encouraged to also read Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008), Ch. 4, and Michael Bentley, “Past and ‘Presence’: Revisiting Historical Ontology,” History and Theory 45 (October 2006): 349-361.

Elly Truitt introduced Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (UPenn, 2008), Introduction and Chapter 3; and Carol Symes, “When We Talk About Modernity,” American Historical Review (June, 2011): 715-26.

The group discussed Greg Dening, “Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay,” History and Theory 41, no. 1 (2002): 1-24, and Berber Bevernage, “Tales of pastness and contemporaneity: on politics of time in history and anthropology,” MS. )  

The group discussed Ch. 1 of Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (Columbia, 1983); Ch. 6 of David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Indiana University Press, 1991); and John Zammito, "Koselleck's Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History," History and Theory 43 (2004): 124-35.