The Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology was delivered by Professor Georgina Born FBA, University of Oxford at the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences on May 19th 2015.
Chaired by Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern FBA, University of Cambridge.
How can anthropology help us to understand the epochal social and cultural changes catalysed by the take up of digital media and the internet? This lecture readdressed classic anthropological concerns, among them the nature of time and, as befits the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, of social relations, drawing on a global programme of ethnographic studies of art and popular digital music cultures in Argentina, Canada, Cuba, India, Kenya and the United Kingdom. The lecture indicated how doing anthropology through music can revitalize these fundamental concerns, opening up new conceptual directions, while reshaping what has been called an anthropology of the contemporary.
About the speaker:
Georgina Born FBA is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Fellow of Mansfield College. She directs the ERC-funded ethnographic research programme ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation’ which examines the transformation of music by digitisation. She holds visiting professorships at McGill University and Oslo University, and was previously Bloch Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
The British Academy
Source
Professor Born is a phenomenal (ethno)musicologist and anthropologist, and yes, it seems she is correct on most counts in this lecture, but by God I wish she would use words with less syllables (just some of the time) — would it be hypocritical of me to say that over the course of that 65minutes I have developed sesquipedalophobia? Probably.