Venue : NUS Bukit Timah Campus Singapore
Organiser : Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Synopsis : The Force of Life: Living in Precarious Spaces and Times in Asia, 20-21 July 2015
Keynote address by Prof Veena Das
A pressing concern in social theory continues to be the question of how the social is made durable? As notions of vulnerability and precarity become mainstream in anthropology, the reliance on the solidity of categories through which social life is organized have yielded place to notions of in-between, flow, overlapping social scapes etc. In this presentation I want to see how the durable and the ephemeral are woven together to think of the idea of “life”. In brief, I wish to see what cognitive resources can I take from the notions of the momentary, the fleeting, the fugitive , as the conditions through which life is affirmed and reflect on the difference it makes when we put these notions next to those of the liminal, the transitory, or the in-between.
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