<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Nancy Scheper-Hughes Lecture: "A Talent for
Life: Reflecti</title></head><body>
<div><font color="#000000">Save the date: Thursday, November 30 at
5:30 p.m.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Main Lecture Hall</font>, Hampshire
College</div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br>
"A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human Vulnerability and
Resilience"<br>
by Nancy Scheper-Hughes</font><br>
</div>
<div><font color="#000000">ABSTRACT</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><i>"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."</i> Terrence Des Pres
(l976)</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br>
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.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">For more information:</font></div>
<div><font
color="#000000">http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/nsh.html</font></div>
<div><font
color="#000000">http://ls.berkeley.edu/dept/anth/criticalstudies.html</font
></div>
<div><font color="#000000">http://cbd.hampshire.edu</font><br>
</div>
<div><font color="#000000">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.</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font color="#000000">This is a Distinguished Lecture of
the</font> Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College
Program in Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD)</div>
<div><font color="#000000">http://cbd.hampshire.edu</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>Paula Harmon, Coordinator</div>
<div>Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College Program
in Culture, Brain, and Development (CBD)<br>
Adele Simmons Hall, Room 100<br>
Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002<br>
phone: 413-559-5501; fax: 413-559-5438<br>
email: cbd@hampshire.edu<br>
http://cbd.hampshire.edu</div>
</body>
</html>