Edge-Effects: Remediating Crisis and Critique in the Ayoreo Video Project

Abstract:How can we envision an effective critical response to the non-sensical violence against life on our planet? To formulate a response to this perplexing dilemma, this talk will draw on the experimental video imagery recently created by Ayoreo-speaking people of the Paraguayan and Bolivian Gran Chaco. It explores how unauthorized Indigenous self-imagery and the minor conditions of its production may offer untimely correctives to the visual economies, temporal causalities, perceptual registers and political lexicons often presumed to define the so-called “Anthropocene.” In doing so, it asks how Ayoreo remediations of self and world may charter novel axes for ethnographic critique.
Speaker:
Dr. Lucas Bessire is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and winner of the Bateson Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology.
 
Registration is not required. For more information, see the poster.Room 134, Anthropology and Sociology Building, 6303 NW Marine Dr., Vancouver, BC