To celebrate the opening of the new academic year, the social and cultural anthropology programme of the Leuven Faculty of Social Sciences has invited Professor Henrietta Moore to deliver the 2017 inaugural anthropology lecture.
As a modernist project, anthropology’s roots lie in very specific practices of change: in engagements with colonial policies, development projects, changing economies and cosmologies, policy initiatives and so on. But how well is anthropology as a discipline equipped to cope with emergent issues currently affecting human societies? Anthropologists have a long interest in questions of sustainability and resilience, but what contribution can the discipline make to envisioning sustainable human futures, and to the changing nature of human agency, cognition, and embodiment those futures might imply? This lecture will discuss these questions in relation to the kinds of solutions being proposed by international institutions, societies and communities to the major challenges of planetary sustainability and economic and social precariousness. It will explore anthropology’s role in envisioning futures and developing approaches to the creation of new social, economic and political institutions needed for sustainable global prosperity.
