The Technical Action Cluster presents: “Techniques at the Threshold: Moving and Dwelling in Inner Asian Worlds”
When: November 17, 13:00 – 15:30
Where: B0073 Leeuwenborch
Speaker
Kristen Pearson PhD Candidate, Harvard, Anthropology and Inner Asian Studies
Principle Investigator, EMKP Project: Nomadic Material Heritage: Documenting Textile and Animal Hide Crafts in Western Mongolia
About the event
Kirsten examines how mobile herders in Mongolia construct social worlds through embodied practices of making, using, and exchanging objects. The yurt (Kazakh kiiz ui, Mongolian ger) serves as both an intimate home space and a node within spatially extensive social networks. I use techniques of moving and dwelling as a lens for investigating which human and non-human entities are encompassed within or excluded from the social. Through attention to practices for managing dangerous gazes, consequential affects, and vital forces, I demonstrate how techniques work not only to define categorical boundaries between kinds of beings, but also to negotiate relations within categories. These techniques take on new resonance in the context of Kazakhs’ accelerating outmigration from Western Mongolia, as those who stay behind employ traditional techniques to reconfigure relations within volatile networks. These material practices reveal how technical knowledge about efficacies and agencies can persist across cosmopolitical boundaries and in times of rapid change.
Any questions? Please contact Geoffrey Hobbis (geoffrey.hobbis@wur.nl)
Centre for Space, Place and Society 