A scientific evening called Family and State – Entanglements or Oppositions? will take place on 20 December at 17:30 at the Baltic-German University Liaison Office (12 Z. A. Meierovica bulvāris, Riga).
Dr. Erdmute Alber (University of Bayreuth) will give a guest lecture about “The African Extended Family – a European Imagination” and Assoc. Prof. Klāvs Sedlenieks (Riga Stradiņš University) will give a presentation about “200 Years of the End of Family in Europe”.
About the presentations
In general, the extended family is seen as the most important institution structuring everyday life and relationships in Africa. It is imagined to be as well the main category of social organisation in pre-colonial Africa. Dr. Alber's talk challenges this ubiquitous anthropological and sociological assumption by arguing that the category of the extended family was introduced through French colonial politics, mainly by processes of codifying and organising local indirect rule. In the lecture Dr. Alber will contribute to a temporalising perspective on the languages of kinship and to identifying their political impact.
In his presentation, Assoc. Prof. Sedlenieks will demonstrate that since the beginning of the 19th century, various thinkers in the European and American intellectual landscape have constructed an idea that kinship-related structures and family in particular are inevitably on the brink of extinction. Assoc. Prof. Sedlenieks points out that these theories themselves should be interpreted as a cultural narrative rooted in a particular two-level kinship that the European/American societies have themselves.
About the speakers
Dr. Erdmute Alber holds the chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. Her main research interests are the entanglements of kinship and politics, childhood, and intergenerational relations.
Assoc. Prof. Klāvs Sedlenieks is an associated professor and lead researcher at Riga Stradiņš University. His main research interests are the anthropology of the state and more recently – kinship as an aspect of the modern state.
The event is organised in cooperation with Riga Stradiņš University and the Latvian Association of Anthropology.
Location
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