Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod, (Columbia University)
"Acknowledgements of an Anthropologist"
Anthropologists move across incommensurate worlds in distinctive ways, moving back and forth between worlds in which they have different relationships to people, but also different responsibilities and debts. In this lecture, Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod reflects in a personal way about ways she has been formed by moving between ethnography and the academy in the hope of contributing to the soul-searching that has overtaken our discipline about its ethics. The ferment around decolonizing research provokes us to consider how we should acknowledge our indebtedness to the people and experiences that formed us. Dr. Abu-Lughod will circle around two questions: Do acknowledgements of debts need to be followed by apology? And do the forms of inequality that inevitably mark our various relationships, including what we give others and what they give us, preclude the possibility of mutuality?
All welcome! A light lunch will be served.
Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod’s work, strongly ethnographic and mostly based in Egypt, has focused on three broad issues: the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics of knowledge and representation; and the dynamics of women’s and human rights, global liberalism, and feminist governance of the Muslim world. Current research focuses on museum politics in Palestine and other settler colonies, security discourses and Islamophobia, and religion in the global governance of gender violence.