Society Assaulted: Audit Culture, and Austerity in Europe and Asia

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences </strong> Seminar Notice <strong>Prof. Michael Herzfeld </strong> (Department of Anthropology, Harvard University) a talk on <strong>Society Assaulted: Audit Culture, and Austerity in Europe and Asia</strong> <strong>Date : March 19, 2015 </strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>The speaker will argue that the globally dominant economic systems broadly subsumed under the generic label of "neoliberalism" have exploited forms of audit culture, themselves an evolved derivative of colonial management, to destroy the infrastructure of ordinary social relations. While this process continues the logic of nationalist doctrines that sought to expropriate kinship as a state metaphor, its menace is today amplified by the sheer scale of its operations. Resistance is usually unsuccessful; the few exceptions risk marginalizing those who do succeed as hold-outs from an earlier era, unfit for the modern world. An engaged anthropology must actively oppose this massive trend, but must do so through the difficult task of interesting a jaded public in the significance of ethnographic detail. Focusing on patterns observable in large areas of Europe and Asia, and more particularly on contrasted cases of resistance to eviction on which he has conducted ethnographic research in Rome and Bangkok, the speaker will suggest why some cases of resistance succeed while others fail, and why some do catch the public eye; he will then also describe the practical problems involved in sustaining public interest and taking it beyond a merely romantic obsession with heroic resistance and tragic destruction. <strong>Bio-Data:</strong> Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where has taught since 1991. The author of eleven books -- including Cultural Intimacy (1997),The Body Impolitic (2004), Evicted from Eternity (2009), and Siege of the Spirits (forthcoming, 2016) -- and numerous articles and reviews, he has also produced two ethnographic films (Monti Moments [2007] and Roman Restaurant Rhythms [2011]). He is IIAS Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Leiden (and Senior Advisor to the Critical Heritage Studies Initiative of the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden); Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne; and Visiting Professor and Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) Scholar at Shanghai International Studies University (2015-17). His most research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has addressed, inter alia, the social and political impact of historic conservation and gentrification, the discourses and practices of crypto-colonialism, social poetics, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.