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.
Authorizing Moral Crusades: Rights Talk and Literary Trafficking
Thursday October 4th, 2012
Michael Ames Theatre – Museum of Anthropology, 11:30-1:00
Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod
Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science
Director, Center for the Study of Social Difference
Director, Middle East Institute
Department of Anthropology/Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Columbia University
Abstract:
What lies behind the new American common-sense that we should go to war for global women’s rights? This lecture will show how two industries that we rarely think of together are authorizing the current moral crusade to save Muslim women: the international human rights regime and mass-market publishing, which has brought us a sordid genre of pulp non-fiction about Muslim women’s bondage and oppression. Drawing on her experiences in rural Egypt over the past thirty years and urging us to think carefully about our own lives, Professor Abu-Lughod offers an alternative way to think about the key terms of this crusade—choice versus force, freedom versus bondage.
