Tallinn Anthropology Lecture Series open to all via Zoom

Tallinn Anthropology Inimkond (‘humankind’) lecture series is starting again. In spring 2022 the series will be fully online on Zoom and can be followed from anywhere in the world regardless of affiliation: zoom.us/j/98607165748 (no password).

Save the dates!

16 Feb 4.15-5.45 pm (all Tallinn time)
Dr Nayanika Mathur
Associate Professor in the Anthropology of South Asia, University of Oxford
Title: Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene
Please find the abstract and other event details below.

9 Mar 4.15-5.45 pm
Dr Gillian Tett
Chair of the Editorial Board and Editor-at-Large, US of the Financial Times
Title: Why a World Drowning in AI Needs Another AI – The Power of Anthropology Intelligence

23 Mar 4.15-5.45 pm
Dr David Trimbach
Research Associate, Oregon State University; Visiting Scholar at Tallinn University
Title: Connecting Communities and Coasts: Enhancing Landscape Management with Sense of Place

13 Apr 4.15-5.45 pm
Dr Daria Krivonos
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Helsinki
Title: Time, Labour and Stolen Future(s) in Postsocialist Migration

11 May 4.15-5.45 pm
Prof Shanti Parikh
Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and of African and African-American Studies, Washington University
Title: Sex Work, HIV, and Sexual Geographies: Implementing a Black Feminist Community-Participatory Research Design

Timezone calculation tool: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

DR NAYANIKA MATHUR: Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene
16 Feb 4.15-5.45 pm (Tallinn time)
Zoom: zoom.us/j/98607165748
Facebook event: www.facebook.com/events/3224871304410291/?ref=newsfeed

ABSTRACT
This talk weaves together beastly tales of big cats that make a prey of humans in India to ask what they may be telling us about a planet in crisis. These tales of crooked cats have been collected over the past 15 years, largely from the Indian Himalayas. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists. This talk explores the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer new insights into nonhuman animals’ governance and their intimate entanglements with humans. It deploys ethnographic storytelling to explain the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as a method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement.

DR NAYANIKA MATHUR is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology of South Asia, Fellow of Wolfson College, and Director of the South Asia Centre at the University of Oxford. She is the author of ‘Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy, and the Developmental State in Himalayan India’ (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and ‘Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene’ (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

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PS! This article will be updated weekly.

16. veebr 2022