Anthropology Colloquium is the department’s speaker series that invites a mixture of anthropologists from within and outside of UBC to present their research. This speaker series is scheduled throughout the academic year, typically with a lunch reception in the AnSo Lounge.
Thursday, March 3rd 11:30-1:00 Asian Centre Auditorium
Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago)
Stranger-Kings, Enemy Heads, Affinal Kin, and Other Foreign Riches: The Alterity of Power and Vice-Versa
Since the eighteenth century, anthropology has been implicated in a major theoretical scandal. Although the world over, local societies have been culturally fashioned through their interdependent engagements with near and distant others, anthropological paradigms of every variety–whether functionalist, Marxist, evolutionary or structuralist–have supposed that cultures are self-fashioned through one or another internal dynamic. Rather than taking cultures as sui generis, this lecture focuses in intercultural relations of order and change, with special attention to the planetary distribution of stranger-king formations as one among several such phenomena of the alterity of power–and the power of alterity.
