Four Domestications: Fire, Plants, Animals and...Us

james scott

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values J a m e s C . s C ot t is the Sterling Professor of Political Science,

Professor of Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endow-ment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Technology, and Society Program at M.I.T. and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism.

Professor Scott’s books include Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009).

mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu

The Tanner Lectures On Human Values 2010–11

The purpose of the Tanner Lectures is the advancement of

scholarly and scientific learning in the field of human values.

That purpose embraces the entire range of moral, artistic,

intellectual, and spiritual values, both individual and social–the

full register of values pertinent to the human condition, interest,

behavior, and aspiration.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a nonprofit corporation

administered at the University of Utah. The Lectures are funded

by an endowment and other gifts received by the University of

Utah from Obert Clark Tanner and Grace Adams Tanner.

Sponsored by the Office of the President and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.

Schedule | May 4–6, 2011

SeminarFriday, May 610 am | Thompson Room Barker Center

m o d e r at o r

Homi BhabhaAnne F. Rothenberg Professor of the HumanitiesHarvard University

r e s p o n d e n t s

Partha ChatterjeeProfessor of Anthropology Columbia University

Veena DasKrieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology Johns Hopkins University

Arthur KleinmanEsther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology Harvard University

Lucie WhiteLouis A. Horwitz Professor of LawHarvard Law School

LecturesJames Scott

“Four Domestications: Fire, Plants, Animalsand ... Us”

L e C t u r e 1

The Late Neolithic Multi-Species Resettlement Camp

Wednesday, May 44 pm | Lowell Lecture Hall

I n t r o d u C t I o n s

Drew Gilpin FaustPresidentHarvard University

Homi BhabhaAnne F. Rothenberg Professor of the HumanitiesHarvard University

L e C t u r e 2

The Long Golden Age of Barbarians, a.k.a. Non-State Peoples

Thursday, May 54 pm | Lowell Lecture Hall

I n t r o d u C t I o n

Sugata BoseGardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs Harvard University

Hom I K . BHaBHa is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost, and Chair of the Tanner Selection Committee at Harvard Uni- versity. He is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cos- mopolitanism, among other themes. His publications include Nation and Narration (1990) and The Location of Culture (1994). Most recently, he has contributed essays to exhibition catalogues on the work of Taryn Simon, Anish Kapoor, Raqib Shaw, and Shahzia Sikander. He has served as an advisor at key art institutions, a Trustee of the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity, and Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Human Rights.

sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard Uni- versity. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in History at Harvard and as the Founding Director of Harvard’s South Asia Initiative. Pro- fessor Bose’s books include Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (1993), A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006), Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (with Ayesha Jalal, 3rd edition, 2011), and His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (2011). His scholarship has contributed to a deeper understanding of colonial and postcolonial political economy, the relation between rural and urban

domains, inter-regional arenas of travel, trade and imagination across the Indian Ocean, and Indian ethical discourses, political philosophy, and economic thought.

partHa CHatterJee is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and Honorary Professor and former Director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta. Among his books are Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986), The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), A Princely Impostor?: The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002), The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004), and Empire and Nation: Selected Essays (2010). He is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective. His new work on a global history of imperial practices—The Black Hole of Empire—will be pub-lished later this year.

Veena das is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent books are Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007) and Anthropology and Sociology of Economic Life: The Moral Embedding of Economic Action (co-edited with Ranendra Das, 2010). Professor Das is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the Academy of Scientists from Developing Countries. She is the recipient of the Anders Retzius Gold Medal of the Swedish

Society of Anthropology and Geo- graphy and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2000 by the University of Chicago. Her work has been translated into Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

drew gIL p I n Faust is the 28th President of Harvard University and the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Serving since 2007, Faust was previously the founding Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the faculty for 25 years. A historian of the Civil War and the American South, she is the author of six books. Her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, looks at the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of 19th-century Americans. It won the Bancroft Prize in 2009, was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times one of the “10 Best Books of 2008.”

artHur K Le I nman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, Professor of Social Medicine and Psy- chiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard Asia Center. Since 1968, Professor Kleinman has conducted research on depression, somatization, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and suicide, and other forms of violence in Chinese society. His books include Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Neurasthenia,

Depression and Pain in Modern China (1986), The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (1988), Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine (1995), and What Really Matters: Liv-ing a Moral Life Amidst Uncertainty and Danger (2006). He is a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

LuCIe wHI te is the Louis A. Horwitz Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She specializes in economic and social rights in the United States and Africa with a focus on using law to empower marginalized groups and combat extreme inequality. In Ghana’s impoverished north, she works with Ghanaian colleagues on a multi-year Right to Health project. In Cambridge she has worked with low-income women organizing for mental health rights. She has been a Fulbright Senior Africa Scholar, a Carnegie Scholar on Teach- ing and Learning, a scholar in residence at the Harvard Divinity School, and a Bunting Scholar at Radcliffe College. She has published widely on the theory and practice of economic and social rights, and recently convened a col-laboration among human rights scholars, African lawyers, and grassroots activists culminating in Lucie White and Jeremy Perelman, eds., Stones of Hope: African Activists use Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty (2010).

t r u s t e e s

Robert and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Chancellor of University of California, Berkeley

Roger and Elizabeth Lindsey CashmoreBrasenose College, Oxford

Mary Sue and Kenneth ColemanUniversity of Michigan

John and Andrea HennessyStanford University

Carolyn Tanner IrishEpiscopal Bishop of Utah

Stephen Tanner IrishSalt Lake City

Richard and Jane LevinYale University

Kent and Barbara MurdockO.C. Tanner Company

Chase and Grethe PetersonPresident Emeritus of the University of Utah

Frederick QuinnWashington, DC and Salt Lake City

Drew Gilpin Faust and Charles RosenbergHarvard University

Ekhard and Lisa SaljeClare Hall, Cambridge

Shirley TilghmanPrinceton University

Michael K. and Suzan YoungPresident, University of Utah

H a r Va r d

ta n n e r C o m m I t t e e

Homi K. Bhabha (Chair)Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities

Lizabeth CohenHoward Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies

Caroline ElkinsProfessor of History

Charles FriedBeneficial Professor of Law

Jack GoldsmithHenry L. Shattuck Professor of Law

Stephen J. GreenblattJohn Cogan University Professor of the Humanities

Steven E. HymanProvost

Arthur KleinmanEsther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology

Lawrence LessigProfessor of Law

Martha MinowDean, Harvard Law School

Michael SandelAnne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government

Elaine ScarryWalter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value

Alison SimmonsSamuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy

Elizabeth SpelkeMarshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology