Spark Talk: “How to Have Inclusive Anthropologies of Subjectivity and Personhood” by John Marlovits and Matthew Wolf-Meyer (Mar. 7th, 2025)
Mar 7, 2025
10:30AM to 11:30AM
Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/03/2025
10:30 am - 11:30 am
Description: Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as “normal,” which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, we argue for the need to attend to interactions and behavior as the necessary basis for anthropological studies of personhood and subjectivity. The speakers will introduce a ‘psychotic anthropology’ that centers atypical forms of consciousness and seeks to unsettle anthropological assumptions about mind, cognition, and consciousness.
Bios: John Marlovits’ work addresses affect and psychogeography – the psychic and material infrastructures of everyday life — and the way in which place-based practices facilitate personal and collective transformation. Marlovits’ research has focused on places – such as Seattle, California, Osaka – where the utopian, the futuristic, the retro, and the dystopian intermingle in odd combinations, shaping tensions that generate imaginative responses to cultural impasses, and formulating emerging and jury-rigged worlds. Marlovits is drawn to hybrid and “bad subjects” – such as the depressed, the skateboarder, the bohemian, the slacker, or the surf bum – that live out their cultural impasse, refuse its normativities, and seek new forms of personhood beyond melancholic attachments to impossible, or highly labor-disciplined, lives. He has written about psychogeographies of depression and the affective contradictions of neoliberalism in Seattle; and is currently working on a project titled “Stupid Wooden Toys: Infrastructure and the Dream-Work of Skateboarding” that examines skateboarding as a vernacular design practice for remaking publics and spaces of belonging in the margins of capitalist ruins
Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S. Wolf-Meyer marries ethnographic research with patients, their families, and patient support networks, participant-observation of scientists, clinicians, and health care workers, and archival analysis of scientific monographs and public policies to show how thorny, contemporary problems have developed out of longstanding ideas about health and disease, disability and normalcy, and nature and civilization.