For this special issue we are bringing together six ethnographic cases
of intimate uncertainties that are situated within different regimes of
reproduction, healthcare and borders in and beyond Europe. These
ethnographic inquiries exemplify unprecedented settings of moral
ir/responsibility shaping the intimate on different scales and in various
sites of power (agencies, clinics, borderlands). These uncertainties
in times of major transitions from old to new moral orders, from
industrial to postindustrial, from welfare to austerity spark off a
renewed debate on moral economy. The authors of these contributions
all focus the theoretical lens of moral economy squarely onto
the intimate.
The Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern inaugurated its new lecture series Anthropology Talks in September 2015. The fi rst guest was James Ferguson, professor at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. The lectures and workshops focused on the questions of poverty and (re)distribution that Ferguson, a scholar with a pronounced political commitment, deals with in his new book Give a Man a Fish (2015a). Ferguson's thinking involves, within a context of widespread unemployment, a creative tension between ethnographic curiosity and political concerns about poverty reduction. Through projects that «just give money to the poor» (2015a: 2), his work examines what such interventions do in people's everyday lives, and how they might direct us towards a new politics of distribution, or «proletarian politics today,» as the main lecture's title suggested (Ferguson 2015b).
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