On Religiosity and Commercial Life: A Critique of Posthuman Cultural Economy

Presented by Professor Chris Gregory, political and economic anthropologist with a joint appointment at the University of Manchester and the Australian National University.

Date: Wednesday, 14 May 2014

Time: 17:00 for 17:30‒19:00, followed by a reception

Venue: Merensky Library Auditorium

Location: University of Pretoria, Hatfield Campus

RSVP by Friday, 9 May: [email protected]
 

Fukuyama argues that ‘the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a “posthuman” stage of history’. I argue, by contrast, that anthropology has already reached a posthuman stage of intellectual development. The attribution of agency to things has dehumanised anthropology and contributed to the creation of a new multidisciplinary paradigm: posthuman cultural economy, an approach that Fukuyama, along with Appadurai and Callon, has done much to popularise. This paradigm takes the point of view of the superprime financial trader rather than that of the subprime precariat. Anthropology entered this posthuman stage in the late 1970s and early 1980s but there are some positive signs of change.