[CS] Nancy Scheper-Hughes Lecture: "A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human Vulnerability and Resilience," Nov. 30 at Hampshire

[Paula Harmon]

Save the date: Thursday, November 30 at 5:30 p.m.
Main Lecture Hall, Hampshire College

"A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human Vulnerability and Resilience"
  by Nancy Scheper-Hughes

ABSTRACT
"It wasn't ruthlessness that enabled an individual to survive -- it 
was an intangible quality, not particular to educated or 
sophisticated individuals. Anyone might have it. It is perhaps best 
described as an overriding thirst -- perhaps ,too, a talent for 
life."    Terrence Des Pres (l976)

My talk deals with human resilience and 'hardiness' as opposed to 
human frailty and vulnerability. The experience of catastrophe, 
disaster, and trauma are part of the expected backdrop of everyday 
life among people living in protracted war zones and under social and 
economic conditions that mimic wartime. In these cases, traumas are 
constant, unresolved, and repeated, and only rarely consigned to 
history, the past, and the relative luxury of trace or traumatic 
memories. Based on decades of anthropological research among 'hunted' 
street kids, mothers and infants on the verge of die-outs in the 
drought plagued Nordeste of Brazil, massacre survivors of the anti 
-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and dis-placed and dis-graced 
kidney sellers duped or seduced into providing their organs to first 
world transplant tourists, I argue that human resilience and 
'hardiness' have been grossly underestimated in contemporary 
psychological and anthropological literature. Drawing on very 
disparate life histories and very different contexts, I will outline 
"what it takes" to live under such conditions, and to suggest an 
alternative model of adversity and survival.

For more information:
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/nsh.html
http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/criticalstudies.html
http://cbd.hampshire.edu

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of anthropology at the University 
of California at Berkeley. She has conducted field research on 
madness among bachelor farmers in rural Ireland; AIDS and human 
rights in Cuba; death squads and street kids; mother love and child 
death in the shantytowns of Brazil; popular justice in South African 
squatter camps; and invisible genocides among native Californians. 
Her lifework concerns the violence of everyday life examined from a 
radical existentialist and politically engaged perspective. Her 
examination of structural and political violence, of what she calls 
"small wars and invisible genocides" has allowed her to develop a 
so-called 'militant' anthropology, which has been broadly applied to 
medicine, psychiatry, and to the practice of anthropology.

This is a Distinguished Lecture of the Foundation for Psychocultural 
Research-Hampshire College Program in Culture, Brain, and Development 
(CBD)
http://cbd.hampshire.edu

-- 
Paula Harmon, Coordinator
Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College Program in 
Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD)
Adele Simmons Hall, Room 100
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002
phone: 413-559-5501; fax: 413-559-5438
email: cbd at hampshire.edu
http://cbd.hampshire.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.hampshire.edu/pipermail/cs/attachments/20061030/37f19e30/attachment.htm>