Recently in Lectures Category

In this lecture, William Mazzarella will consider recent controversies over film censorship in India from the perspective of the category of "obscenity." The talk will address two goals: to move beyond the standard understanding of censorship battles as an opposition between "progressives" and "reactionaries" and to mine the Indian legal understanding of obscenity for how it might help us think about the politics of mainstream publicity, beyond what is conventionally categorized as "obscene."

William Mazzarella has taught in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago since 2001. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Mazzarella is the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003). For the last several years, he has been researching and writing on cultural regulation, censorship, affect, and what he calls "the politics of immediation."

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Drawing on ethnographic field research in the Indian Himalayas, Dyson explores forest-related work as a site for young people to build friendships, create individual and collective reputations of competence, and develop a sense of selfrespect. Through attention to the 'micro-geography of work,' Dyson considers the importance of forest-based work in local ideas of dignity and explores how far girls' leaf collection practices reproduce caste and gender norms.

Jane Dyson is a Visiting Scholar in the South Asia Center at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the everyday work practices of children and young people in the Indian Himalayas. Dyson focuses in particular on young people's creative struggles for respect, and examines how children themselves imagine and value their work practices. She has a forthcoming book, Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Political Geography that she co-edited with Craig Jeffrey (Geography).


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In January of this year, the Japanese ruling party passed a bill altering the meaning and intent of a key education law. Over its 60-year history, the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) served as a final guarantor of educational rights and a bulwark against pressures for Japan to remilitarize. The new law requires schools to "foster patriotic attitudes" and parents to accept more responsibility for their children's successful development. Although many critics view these changes as a return to the heavy-handed interventionist state of prewar times, Arai argues that they represent the shifting of responsibility from the government to the individual. Arai suggests that this new disciplinary structure is suited to the pressures of economic globalization. In this talk, Arai tracks the inception of these changes from the recessionary 1900s to the present demand for mobility, liquidity, and internalized sacrifice in an era when national futures no longer guarantee personal ones.

The notion of "quality," or suzhi, has become a cultural determination of the value form of labor in China's economic reforms, marking the divide between manual and mental labor. As a specifically Chinese articulation of the concept of human capital, suzhi must be understood within the frame of the global economy. However, its workings in the context of China offers a critical perspective on new conceptions of value circulating more globally as the "immaterial labor" of the "knowledge economy."

Corruption is central to the everyday economies and identities of young people in urban north India. Jeffrey uses an analysis of corruption as a lens through which to understand emerging youth cultures in India and changing patterns of caste and class reproduction. Jeffrey builds on a critical engagement with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and five years of ethnographic field research conducted between 1995 and 2007 in western Uttar Pradesh.

Craig Jeffrey is Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the cultural politics of inequality in India, with particular reference to agrarian change, educational regimes, youth politics, and rural poverty. Jeffrey has published nearly forty articles and has two forthcoming books: Reproducing Difference? Education, Unemployment, and Youth Cultures in India (with Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery) and Telling Young Lives: Portraits in Political Geography (coedited with Jane Dyson).

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In this presentation, Corbridge will reflect on the status and integrity of development studies as a discipline. Is it an impossible enterprise, and if not, why not? How meaningful are discourses of "development" at a time of war in Iraq and when the median age of death in sub-Saharan Africa is slightly less than 5 years?

Danny Hoffman (Anthropology)

Nancy Abelmann (Anthropology, University of Illinois)

Susan Ruddick (Geography, University of Toronto)