After the Event - Prospects and Retrospects of Revolution

In what ways do revolutions continue to shape people’s lives in their wake, and in what manners are revolutionary events in turn shaped by subsequent political practice and discourse? How can we engage conceptually and ethnographically with the complex permutations that radical political projects undergo over time, their unexpected and perplexing consequences? What are the implications of the study of revolution for anthropology more generally and how can the discipline contribute to wider debates about the very possibility of revolutionary futurity in our purportedly post-revolutionary age? This event is the closing day of a 3-day conference on the anthropology of revolutions addressing these questions. It is organised by postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows at UCL’s department of anthropology.

Photo: After the Event. Prospects and Retrospects of Revolution, UCL Anthropology 15-17 May. Image Kaya Uzel

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David Lan is an award-winning English playwright, filmmaker and theatre director. Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1952, he emigrated to London in 1972. From 2000 to 2018, he was Artistic Director and Director at the Young Vic. He trained as a Social Anthropologist at the LSE. After two years of field research in the Zambezi Valley (1980 to 1982), he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on religion and politics, which formed the basis of his 1985 monograph Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. His plays include Flight, A Mouthful of Birds, Desire, Charley Tango, and The Ends of the Earth, and he has written two opera libretti, Tobias and the Angel and Ion.

Martin Holbraad is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. His publications include The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge University Press, 2016, co-authored); Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge, 2007, co-edited).

Caroline Humphrey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2002, Heldt Prize); Marx Went Away, but Karl Stayed Behind (University of Michigan Press, 1998); and Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Bruce Kapferer is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen (Norway). His publications include 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche and Anthropology (Chicago University Press, 2014); Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Berghahn, 2011; Smithsonian, 1998); The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power (Chicago, 1997); A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka (University of Indiana Press, 1987 and 1991); and Strategy and Transaction in an African Factory (Manchester University Press, 1972).

Bjørn Thomassen is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde Universitet, Denmark. His books include Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between (2014). He works broadly across the social and political sciences with a focus on global political sociology. Research areas and interests include urban studies, cultural and political dimensions of globalisation, nationalism, religion, identity & memory politics, revolutions. Regions of specialization: Italy, Southern Europe, the Mediterranean area, Europe.

Nicola Miller is Professor of Latin American History at UCL. She is interested in the intellectual, cultural, political and international history of the Americas, in comparative and transnational perspectives; and in nationalism and national identity, especially in the Americas. Her current research focuses on the history of knowledge in Latin America. Her books include Republics of Knowledge (Princeton, forthcoming) and Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).