Harry Walker

Spécialiste de l’Amazonie, où il a effectué des recherches de terrain de longue durée auprès des Urarina (Pérou), Harry Walker enseigne aujourd’hui à la London School of Economics and Political Science. Il a consacré une monographie à la tension entre autonomie et dépendance qui caractérise la vie sociale des Amérindiens d’Amazonie (Under a Watchful Eye, California UP, 2013), et a publié de nombreux travaux sur des thèmes aussi variés que le sport, la bureaucratie et la justice.

Responsibility as an element of justice

Dans le cadre du séminaire international des anthropologues (Olivier Allard & Marie-Aude Fouéré).

Unlike the closely related concept of agency, responsibility has not received much serious attention within anthropology. This lecture outlines an anthropological approach to responsibility as an element of everyday practices and pursuits of justice, with particular attention to its complex entanglement with notions of intentionality. It further argues that tracing the ways in which attributions of responsibility shift over time may provide valuable insight into the dynamics of social change.

• Mercredi 2 mai 2018, de 17h-19h – EHESS (Amphithéâtre François Furet), 105 Bd Raspail, 75005 Paris

An ecology of singularity: moral individualism and the Amazonian commons

Dans le cadre du séminaire du LIER.

This lecture elaborates an Amazonian conception of the common and the challenge it poses to Western thinking about individualism and equality. It is suggested that a number of distinctive features of Amazonian sociality may have their basis in a shared refusal of factors that give rise to relations of equivalence between people. This kind of singularism, or ‘individualism without individuals’, results from an orientation to the common as a collective resource that is antithetical to property, in which subjectivity is shaped in relation to wider ecological and affective resources that are continuously and collectively produced. This embraces not only shared economic resources, such as land or game animals, but also ways of organising and producing affective, cognitive and linguistic relations, ‘commonalities’ of various kinds which never reduce differences to an abstract subject, such as the individual of liberalism or the collective of socialism.

• Jeudi 3 mai 2018, de 18h-20h - EHESS (salle commune du LIER), 10 rue Monsieur le Prince, 75006 Paris

Fragile Time: The redemptive force of the Urarina apocalypse

Dans le cadre du séminaire « Commerce, travail et trafics en Amazonie » (Olivier Allard et Catherine Alès)

Amazonian Urarina often speak of an imminent catastrophic collapse of the fragile climate that sustains life, albeit one that can be forestalled through appropriate human action. Yet the health of the land and of people also reflect the present state of the wider social and moral order; for the Urarina, human life and human concerns are closely tied to atmospheric, geologic and hydrologic processes. All are addressed simultaneously through shamanic ritual, which emphasises the role humans can play in delaying or mitigating an inexorable process of decline and loss. Apocalyptic discourse thus effectively provides people with the resources for moral engagement with the world. Weather and time are conceptually indistinct in Urarina cosmology, ultimately leading to a conception of weather-time as both an existential horizon of being and a form of the common good, a global commons that is continually and collectively produced through sustained human action.

• Vendredi 11 mai 2018, de 11h à 13h – EHESS (salle 3), 105 Bd Raspail, 75006 Paris

Amazonian Appropriations of Bureaucracy and Documents

Dans le cadre du séminaire « Oikonomia. Gouverner les pratiques quotidiennes » (Benoît de l’Estoile)

The creative and ever-expanding appropriations of bureaucracy and documents on the part of Amazonian peoples today transcend simple dichotomies between orality and literacy, state and non-state power, and domination and resistance. Through the reading of a collective work on the topic and of a specific research conducted among the Amazonian Urarina, we will discuss the specific forms taken by such engagements and the ways in which they assume a key role in local political processes, offering new perspectives on issues ranging from the everyday workings of the state to local theories of language and materiality.

• Mercredi 16 mai 2018, de 10h-12h30 - ENS Campus Jourdan (salle R3_35), 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris