The following event has been canceled:

The Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series presents:

"Vivir con dignidad:  Poverty, Morality, and the Aesthetics of the Gift in La Pincoya"
with Clara Han, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

Tuesday, April 12, 2011
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway, Room 3323

Since the democratic transition in Chile, the state has sought to pay the “social debt” to the poor incurred through market reforms under the Pinochet regime.  This “social debt” has emerged in the lives of the low-income families in the form of targeted poverty programs for those qualifying as “extremely poor”.  While such poverty programs have followed to a great extent the policy frameworks and criteria for poverty advanced under Pinochet, the nature of poverty itself has transformed in the wake of an expansion of consumer credit (and perpetual economic indebtedness) as well as precarious labor. Putting such poverty programs in conversation with how “living with dignity” is stabilized in popular economic forms and subtle everyday acknowledgements of hardship, Han explores and engages the moral, temporal, and affective dimensions of economic precariousness and emerging forms of solidarity.  In so doing, Han explores how an anthropology of poverty could move through biopolitics to consider emerging configurations or enactments of moral community.

For further information, please contact Norma Miranda, nmiranda@uci.edu or 949-824-7602.