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<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:11pt">Date: </span><span style="font-size:11pt">Thursday 2nd March<br>
Time: 4:30-6:00pm<br>
Location: Deakin
Waterfront AD1.122 (also: Burwood C2.05, VMP TBC)<br>
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Abstract:<br>
Where do things go when they are lost, discarded, or forgotten? What social
afterlives do they lead? And perhaps more importantly, whose lives are
constituted among the detritus? Through an exploration of such questions, and
the larger patterns that emerge from them, I sketch out new directions for an
anthropology of value, one that looks beyond the horizons of capital towards
the futures that lie in its ruins. To that end, I ask what might constitute
an <i>abject economy</i>—an economy built precisely on the abjection and
abandonment of people, places, and things. What pathways of devalorization and
desuetude might be its conditions of possibility? What emergent forms of life
endure, for example, in the interstices of capital? What non-market practices
and regimes of value are possible within its folds? I develop both a
theoretical framework for future research, and an ethnographic description from
my own work with dumpster-divers, squatters, and other scavengers in several
“global” cities in North America. These scavengers cultivate, in a very real
sense, minor economies, putting into circulation those surpluses—people, places,
and things alike—discarded by the prevailing markets and publics of these
cities. They present us with one model of an abject economy:
non-market forms of surplus value and labor, simultaneously made possible
and necessary by the vicissitudes of capital accumulation. These economies are
paradoxes, neither separable from, nor commensurable with the logic of market
exchange. Such economies hold profound lessons for the anthropology of the
twenty-first century—in which market-centric, “neoliberal” regimes of value
seem to have eclipsed so many other forms of economy. In a moment when there
seems to be no “outside” to capitalism, we may yet discover its
margins, and there may we not only learn a great deal about the ontological
grounds of capital itself, but also discover existing and emergent modes of
valuing otherwise. Giving an account of these dynamics and paradoxes, I will
argue, will be one of anthropology’s key challenges in the coming years. <span></span></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:11pt">Biography: </span><span style="font-size:11pt"><br>
David Boarder Giles is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University in
Melbourne, Australia. He writes about cultural economies of waste and
homelessness, and the politics of urban food security and public space,
particularly in "global" cities. He has done extensive ethnographic
fieldwork in Seattle and other cities in the United States and Australasia with
dumpster divers, urban agriculturalists, grassroots activists, homeless
residents, and chapters of Food Not Bombs—a globalized movement of grassroots
soup kitchens.<span></span></span></font></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="_MailAutoSig"><span style="font-size:9pt;color:rgb(51,51,51)"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Timothy Neale<span></span></font></span></a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9pt;color:rgb(51,51,51)">Research Fellow, Alfred
Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation</span><span style="font-size:9pt"><span></span></span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(71,71,71);font-size:9pt;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Deakin University</span></p>
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