As I promised I would do from time to time, I'm going to stray into Middle Eastern politics today with a brief announcement: Lila Abu-Lughod is going to give the prestigious Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology at my University in about ten days' time, and I wanted to give The Weave bloggers and readers the opportunity of asking her a question through me.

Aside from being an eminent scholar in her own right, she is also the daughter of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Palestinian activist, scholar and famously friend of Edward Said's, with whom he founded Arab Studies Quarterly.

...So, fire away! 

Andrea

Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology for 2009

Monday November 16^th 2009, at 5.30 p.m.

Lecture Theatre MR051, MacRobert Building

University of Aberdeen

Professor Lila Abu-Lughod

Anthropology in the Territory of Rights – Human or Otherwise

Travelling betweentransnational initiatives for Muslim women’s rights and the everyday lives ofsome village women in Egypt, this lecture will argue that anthropologists andethnographers can bring significant critical insights to bear on thewide-ranging current global discourse on rights – human, women’s, indigenous,etc. It will explore the ways in which this discourse supports and gives lifeto moral claims, social networks and institutions, variegated practices,international funding agencies, and various forms of expertise.

About the speaker:

Lila Abu-Lughod is theJoseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropologyand the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at ColumbiaUniversity in New York. She is the author of threeethnographies based on fieldwork in Egypt: Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society; Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories;and Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics ofTelevision in Egypt. She is the editor and co-editor of: Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity inthe Middle East; Media Worlds,and Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.The book project that is currently engaging her, as a Carnegie Scholar, is onthe politics and ethics of the international circulation of discourses onMuslim women’s rights.

About the lecture:

The biennial series ofRadcliffe-Brown Lectures in Social Anthropology was established in 1972 by the British Academyand the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UKand the Commonwealth, to commemorate the Association’s first President, A. R.Radcliffe-Brown, who was also the first Professor of Social Anthropology at theUniversity of Oxford.

Since 2003, the Lectureshave been delivered both at the BritishAcademy in Londonand in Scotland, where theyhave rotated between the Universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Edinburgh. The 2003Lecture was delivered in Aberdeen by ProfessorGillian Feeley-Harnik (University of Michigan), the 2005 Lecture in St Andrews byProfessor Philippe Descola (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and the 2007 Lecture in Edinburghby Professor Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen). On thisoccasion, the Lecture returns once more to Aberdeen. 

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