What is History? The Life and Times of Water Hyacinth

Date/Time
Monday
13 Nov 2017
5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Location
Morrison Room, Doe Library

Event Type
Non-CSTMS Event

Anna L. Tsing
Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz

Debates about the meaning and role of “history” in anthropology have characterized the discipline since its inception. This lecture revisits some of these debates to consider how anthropologists might better incorporate the contingent and transformative abilities of other species into our stories of what happened. Can “history” make room for multiple ontologies? To show how articulations across varied human and non-human agendas forge unexpected paths, this talk considers how the infamous weed plant water hyacinth has tracked and haunted colonial and neocolonial water engineering across the world. See more here.