Invites you to a talk
Plays Well With Otherness:
Capitalism, Disciplinarity and their Limits
Prof. David Pederson
Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of California, San Diego
This paper engages with a particular intellectual current that currently is building strength and
momentum in the context of the contemporary crisis. This is the relatively well-developed tradition of
identifying and discursively amplifying specific places, people and concentrated practices that appear to
offer fully-formed alternatives to capitalism. Both in academic study and also in popular discourse,
there is a solid basis of effort to seek after capitalism’s others. The modern discipline of Anthropology
congealed in part around this task and many anthropologists continue to define their discipline by its
monopoly on alterity with respect to “the West” and what are understood to be ways of life indigenous
to western capitalism. Indeed, the past three or more decades of that discipline and its interaction with
its others in the social sciences and humanities may be characterized as a sustained and occasionally
heated discussion about what is at stake in the study of ways of being human predicated on sharply
distinguishing between the west and its radically different rest. For many anthropologists, the discipline
itself is at risk should it lose its monopoly on the study of non-western cultures and societies. In recent
years, there has been great effort across multiple generations of scholars in the discipline to substantiate
its unique object of study, otherness, as well as its specific tools and expertise for this task. The paper
develops a critique of this revived otherness project and the disciplinary foundationalism that
accompanies it. The paper develops a different approach by building on discussions and debates that
have occurred between the disciplines of Anthropology and History over the past three decades. I
argue that out of the collision and also collusion of the two fields it is possible to discern the contours of
a transdisciplinary approach for the critical study of capitalism and its limits in contexts worldwide.
Though my title borders on cute and is not immediately recognizable as a theoretical and
methodological contribution, I introduce the expression because it accurately suggests the combined
epistemological (play), ethical (well) and ontological (otherness) aspects of properly apprehending
contemporary capitalism’s hold on life and the limits of its grasp.
Date: 25 August 2014
Time: 11:00-13:00
Venue: CISA Seminar Room