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Giovanni da Col

Bio: Giovanni da Col is an academic researcher from University of Cambridge. The author has contributed to research in topics: Vitality & Luck. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 17 publications receiving 488 citations. Previous affiliations of Giovanni da Col include University of London & Max Planck Society.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Anthropology has been largely absent from the recent explosion of interdisciplinary enthusiasm with hospitality across philosophy, political science, and cultural studies as discussed by the authors, yet anthropology's living engagement with hospitality has been far deeper than that of any other discipline.
Abstract: Anthropology has been largely absent from the recent explosion of interdisciplinary enthusiasm with hospitality across philosophy, political science, and cultural studies. Yet anthropology's living engagement with hospitality has been far deeper than that of any other discipline. This essay, which introduces the volume, aims to revitalize hospitality as a frontier area of theoretical development in anthropology by highlighting the topic's connections to some of our discipline's most vibrant themes and concerns: ethical reasoning, materiality, temporality and affect, alterity and cosmopolitics, sovereignty and scale. Resume L'anthropologie a ete la grande absente du recent engouement interdisciplinaire pour l'hospitalite qui a federe philosophie, politologie et etudes culturelles. Son engagement concret sur cette question est pourtant beaucoup plus profond que celui de toute autre discipline. Le present essai, qui preface le volume, vise a raviver l'hospitalite en tant que zone frontiere du developpement theorique en anthropologie, en mettant en lumiere ses liens avec certains des themes les plus vivants de notre discipline : raisonnement ethique, materialite, temporalite et affect, alterite et cosmopolitique, souverainete et echelle.

158 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Favret-Saada as mentioned in this paper has spent more than thirty months in the Bocage in Mayenne studying witchcraft and she is asked again and again when she gets back to the city to tell us all about the witches.
Abstract: Take an ethnographer. She has spent more than thirty months in the Bocage in Mayenne studying witchcraft. ‘How exciting, how thrilling, how extraordinary...! Tell us all about the witches’, she is asked again and again when she gets back to the city. Just as one might say: tell us tales about ogres and wolves, about Little Red Riding Hood. Frighten us, but make it clear that it’s only a story; or that they are just peasants: credulous, backward and marginal. Or alternatively: confirm that out there there are some people who can bend the laws of causality and morality, who can kill by magic and not be punished; but remember to end by saying that they do not really have that power. . . . Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly words ([1977] 1980)

142 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present different conceptions and uses of notions of luck and chance and their relation with moral ontologies and notions of skeptical efficacy, focusing on the interface between cosmology, economics, and human relatedness.
Abstract: Despite the resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in concepts of fortune, luck, and chance, anthropology has failed to engage with the social imagination of these concepts and their incorporation into quotidian moralities and decisions. This essay, which introduces the first of two special issues on this topic, will first present different conceptions and uses of notions of luck and chance and their relation with moral ontologies and notions of skeptical efficacy. By focusing on the interface between cosmology, economics, and human relatedness—that is, cosmoeconomics—this introduction shall then highlight how idioms of luck and fortune foreground a social topology that explicates how innate conceptions of vitality and ‘mystical’ influence, deemed to be of uncertain and uncontrolled nature, are nonetheless able to connect humans and non-humans, organisms and material entities.

46 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the role of poisons in Tibetans' social life and imagination by exploring the interface between cosmology, the economies of fortune, and hospitality in Northwest Yunnan, a Sino-Tibetan border region where fears of poisoning proliferate against a background of tourist development following China's official Shangri-la.
Abstract: Since the early twentieth century, travellers and explorers of the Tibetan-speaking world have reported a host of beliefs concerning the existence of households of mysterious poisoners allegedly killing their guests and visitors. Hitherto, no one has explained the phenomenon. This paper examines the role of poisons in Tibetans' social life and imagination by exploring the interface between cosmology, the economies of fortune, and hospitality in Northwest Yunnan, a Sino-Tibetan border region where fears of poisoning proliferate against a background of tourist development following its nomination as China's official ‘Shangri-la’. By unfolding the figure of the parasite, this paper argues that poisoning fears disclose the profound anxieties underlying the cosmography of the flows of fortune and vitality mobilized in the constitution of ritual kinship and relatedness in hospitality settings. Poisoning fears draw on the traumatic events in which the flows of one's reproductive energies are imagined to be parasitized or ultimately severed. Resume Depuis le debut du vingtieme siecle, les voyageurs et les explorateurs des regions de langue tibetaine rapportent d'innombrables croyances sur l'existence de maisons ou de mysterieux empoisonneurs assassineraient invites et visiteurs. Personne n'a encore pu expliquer ce phenomene. L'auteur etudie ici le role des poisons dans la vie sociale et l'imagination des Tibetains, en explorant l'interface entre cosmologie, economie de la chance et hospitalite dans le nord-ouest du Yunnan, une region frontaliere sino-tibetaine ou la crainte de l'empoisonnement prolifere dans un contexte de developpement touristique faisant suite a la designation de la region comme « Shangri-la » officiel de la Chine. En devoilant la figure du parasite, l'article avance que les craintes d'empoisonnement revelent les angoisses profondes qui sous-tendent la cosmographie des flux de la fortune et de la vitalite, mobilises dans la constitution de la parente rituelle et de l'apparentement dans le cadre de l'hospitalite. La crainte de l'empoisonnement s'appuie sur les evenements traumatisants par lesquels on imagine que le flux des energies reproductives de l'individu peut etre parasite, voire interrompu.

41 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors discuss the role of contingency, fortune, and gambling in the formation of subjectivities and outline how different societies confront the moral conundrums arising from fortune's unequal distribution in the world.
Abstract: This introduction illustrates the modalities in which different societies imagine the tension between the impersonal and individual- ized aspects of fortune and fate. After briefly discussing the role of contingency, fortune, and gambling in the formation of subjectivities, we outline how different societies confront the moral conundrums arising from fortune's unequal distribution in the world. We highlight how luck orientations presentify the future by the deployment of what we name 'technologies of anticipation'. Luck and fortune can be seen as conceptual techniques for short-circuiting temporal subjectivities by creating a crack in time—a space of 'compossibility'—where events deemed to be fatal and inevitable become negotiable. We conclude with a reflection on dice, randomness, and acts of gambling in which not merely subjectivities but the fate or fortune of larger social aggrega- tions—including the cosmos—is deemed at stake.

38 citations


Cited by
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01 Jan 2009

7,241 citations

01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: Familiarity, ease of access, trust, and awareness of risks, will all be important for the future.
Abstract: 萨义德以其独特的双重身份,对西方中心权力话语做了分析,通过对文学作品、演讲演说等文本的解读,将O rie n ta lis m——"东方学",做了三重释义:一门学科、一种思维方式和一种权力话语系统,对东方学权力话语做了系统的批判,同时将东方学放入空间维度对东方学文本做了细致的解读。

3,845 citations

Book ChapterDOI
29 Jun 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a project to reduce the vulnerability of poor people in Haiti to the effects of climate change, while at the same time conserving threatened coastal and marine biodiversity.
Abstract: This project will deliver help to reduce the vulnerability of poor people in Haiti to the effects of climate change, while at the same time conserving threatened coastal and marine biodiversity. Investments in climateproofed and socially-sustainable BD conservation strategies, within the context of the National Protected Areas System (NPAS), will enable coastal and marine ecosystems to continue to generate Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA) services; while additional investment of adaptation funds in the watersheds which drain into these ecosystems will serve to maximize BD benefits and ecosystem functions, as well as generating EBA benefits for the populations living in the watersheds themselves.

2,324 citations

Book
05 Jul 2017
TL;DR: Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks as mentioned in this paper is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world, using Fanon's incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples.
Abstract: Frantz Fanon’s explosive Black Skin, White Masks is a merciless expose of the psychological damage done by colonial rule across the world. Using Fanon’s incisive analytical abilities to expose the consequences of colonialism on the psyches of colonized peoples, it is both a crucial text in post-colonial theory, and a lesson in the power of analytical skills to reveal the realities that hide beneath the surface of things. Fanon was himself part of a colonized nation – Martinique – and grew up with the values and beliefs of French culture imposed upon him, while remaining relegated to an inferior status in society. Qualifying as a psychiatrist in France before working in Algeria (a French colony subject to brutal repression), his own experiences granted him a sharp insight into the psychological problems associated with colonial rule. Like any good analytical thinker, Fanon’s particular skill was in breaking things down and joining dots. His analysis of colonial rule exposed its implicit assumptions – and how they were replicated in colonised populations – allowing Fanon to unpick the hidden reasons behind his own conflicted psychological make up, and those of his patients. Unflinchingly clear-sighted in doing so, Black Skin White Masks remains a shocking read today.

1,433 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance.
Abstract: BRUNO LATOUR, The pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. GEORGES CANGUILHEM, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95. Bruno Latour has written a wonderfully funny book about himself. It is difficult, however, to summarize a text committed to the view that \"Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else\", (p. 158). In Latour's opinion, the common view that sociologists of knowledge and scientists are opposed is incorrect. Both groups, according to Latour, are the authors of identical mistakes: reductionism and, relatedly, attempting to conjoin (in the instance of the sociologist) science and society, or (in the instance of the scientist) keeping them apart. For Latour, there are only forces or resistances which different groups encounter and attempt to conquer by forming alliances. These groups, however, are not simply the actors of conventional sociology. They include, for example, microbes, the discovery of the Pasteurians, with which they have populated our world and which we must now take notice of in any encounter or war in which we engage. War is a fundamental metaphor for Latour, since in a war or a battle clashes of armies are later called the \"victory\" of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov. Likewise, he argues, the Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance. Strangely, he points out, the outcome of this huge battle, the labour and struggle of these masses, we attribute to the scientific genius of Pasteur. Pasteur's genius, however, says Latour, lay not in science (for this could be yet another way of making science and society distinct) but as strategist. Pasteur was able to cross disciplinary lines, recruiting allies to laboratory science by persuading them that they were recruiting him. This was possible because, like the armies in battle, they had already done the work of the general. Thus Pasteur's microbiology, which might conventionally be seen as a whole new science, can also be construed as a brilliant reformulation of all that preceded it and made it possible. Hygienists seized on the work of the Pasteurians and the two rapidly became powerful allies because \"The time that they [the hygienists] had made was now working for them\" (p. 52). French physicians, on the other hand, resisted recruitment, since for them it meant enslavement. Finally, however, they recruited the Pasteurians to their enterprise. Pasteurian public health was turned into a triumph of medicine. It is impossible to read this book and not substitute Latour for Pasteur. At the head of his own army, increasingly enlarged by the recruitment of allies, Latour now presents us, in his own language, with something we have made, or at least made possible. The cynic might say, using the old jibe against sociologists, that Latour has explained to us in his own language everything we knew anyway. Retorting thus, however, would be to unselfconsciously make an ally of Latour and miss the point by a narrow margin that might as well be a million miles. Latour says all this much more clearly (and certainly more wittily) than any review. Read it, but beware; in spite of Latour's strictures about irreducibility, the text is not what it seems. This is a recruitment brochure: Bruno needs you. Among the many historians whom Latour convicts by quotation of mistaking the general for the army, Pasteur for all the forces at work in French society, is Georges Canguilhem. Latour uses two quotes from Canguilhem, both taken from the original French version of Ideology and rationality in the life sciences, first published in 1977. Reading Canguilhem after Latour induces a feeling akin to culture shock. Astonishingly, Canguilhem seems almost Anglo-American. Anyone familiar with Canguilhem's epistemological universe would hardly be surprised to discover that Latour finds in it perspectives different from his own. After all, Canguilhem remains committed to the epistemologically distinct entity science or, better still, sciences. Likewise he employs distinctions between science and ideology, as in Spencerian ideology and Darwinian science, which will seem familiar, possibly jaded to English-reading eyes. His text is liberally seeded with unLatourian expressions, including injunctions to distinguish \"between ideology and science\" (p. 39), lamentations that eighteenth-century medicine \"squandered its energy in the erection of systems\" (p. 53), rejoicing that physiology \"liberated itself' from classical anatomy (p. 54), and regret that \"Stahl's influence ... seriously impeded experimental

1,212 citations