2018-2019 / Whatever Happened to Equality? Considerations of Why Inequalities Come to Seem Global and Inevitable

Inequalities are increasing locally and globally on a vast scale. At the same time, the disparities experienced by racialized groups, certain nationalities, women, poor people, immigrants, and the elderly, are explained by media and politicians as the natural and unavoidable order of things. How are we to understand the relationships between untold wealth and growing immiseration? How do we interpret how stories about inequality are told? Who has access to information about the production of inequality? Who can contest its production?

Inequality and equality are often discussed and studied in isolation. Yet anthropological research in archeology, linguistics, human biology, and socio-cultural anthropology has the capacity to show how equality and inequality are inextricably linked through systems of production, distribution, and domination, both past and present. In documenting such patterns, we gain valuable perspectives on the grim actualities of the current conjuncture, as well as deeper understanding of how radical disparities are formed and legitimated, and what happens when they become taken for granted.

This lecture series takes a global perspective on the entanglements of wealth, poverty, and inequality, as well as popular narratives of inevitability that effectively silence struggles for social justice and equality. Speakers will explore the nature of these human and material entanglements, their mediation through different channels of communication, their ideological justifications through concepts of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, hereditary, and class, and the punitive power to enforce these ideas through incarceration, surveillance, criminalization. We further ask how knowledge about power and inequality empowers resistance and struggle.