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Beyond Adequacy: Hydro-Electrics and Mayan Power in the Terminal Modern

Monday, September 28, 2015
12:00 AM
3512 Haven Hall

Co-sponsored by: Science, Technology & Society

Abstract:

This is a talk about light and water. It will tell you interesting facts about many simple, ordinary things like rain, stars, presence, time, and electricity. And counting. It begins with the story of a massacre of Mayan indigenous people in Rio Negro Guatemala, the prelude to building a hydroelectric dam. It then interweaves contestations for human rights and territory with struggles drawing on Classic Mayan math and efforts to make indigenous people “count” through referenda on the transnational extractive projects that threaten to make the modern terminal. Re-invigorated “Mayan sabiduria (savoir)” begins to work as a lodestone for the radical demand that Maya deserve to live “beyond adequacy,” to enjoy the electrifying promises of “modernity” without always being the ones to shoulder its burdens of loss and displacement, and in modes that admit to wide-ranging forms of liveliness.

Speaker:

Diane M. Nelson is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Her research, drawing on nearly 25 years of work in Guatemala, focuses on subjectivity and power. In particular, she is interested in how complex social formations like nationalism, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intersect with violence and the state to produce people’s senses of identity. Her publications include Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2009).

Co-sponsored by: Science, Technology & Society

Speaker: