Join us on this insightful talk by Dr. Adeem Suhail, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College.
September 10, 2024
Time:
6 pm
A-10, Academic Block
Talk Title: Mass Sacrifice and Redemption in Contemporary Political Life
Abstract: Two decades into the twenty-first century, a panoply of formerly disparate movements, interests, and organisations have converged around shared anxieties about the future of life on earth. We chronicle an implicit logic emergent in these corners, one that organises mass public sacrifice to potentiate futures. We refer to this logic as sacropolitics. Sacropolitis describes a practice-oriented reimagining of crisis-oriented politics across the world. Sacrpolitics draws on multiple, dispersed, and decentralised sources of energy and impetus, and has emerged in a period of great turbulence and acrimony in a highly fractured public sphere, where the very notion of truth is up for grabs. Despite its ambiguity, sacropolitics offers a range of related, collectively generated intimations or snapshots of what the future holds, and all that it may take to get there.
About the Speaker
Dr. Adeem Suhail is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College. His research addresses issues in the anthropology of violence, social theory, and urban studies. His current project, Machines of Violent Desire, interrogates how non-state violence abets transnational projects of order-making in urban South Asia. He is concurrently working on a conceptual project titled 'Sacropolitics', which theorises how human communities confront emergent ecological and political crises across the globe through a politics of repair and rejuvenation through mass sacrifice.
