PROGRAM

New York Academy of Sciences, Anthropology Section 2018-2019 Distinguished Lecture Series: Whatever Happened to Equality?  Considerations of Why Inequalitites Come to Seem Global and Inevitable.

The current crisis in Europe creates new practices and understandings of inter-generational dependencies reaching beyond the intimacy of the home to the reproduction of society as a whole. This talk addresses how older and younger men and women have seen their expectations of stability and wellbeing shattered. In a social context that promotes the entrepreneurial self, autonomy is increasingly difficult to attain and inter-generational forms of care overlap with conflict and resentment.

Neoliberal policy and media discourse present the elderly as a privileged group dispossessing the younger generation from its future. In contrast, my research demonstrates that exchanges of funds, labor, resources, and knowledge between generations within and across households contribute to complex solidarities. Class rather than age is the marker of social differentiation. Important mobilizations in support of public pension systems in Europe challenge a discourse where social security rights are increasingly represented as a form of privilege rather than as means by which a state more equitably distributes resources.

Speaker: Susana Narotzky, University of Barcelona

Discussant: Jane Schneider, C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Barcelona, Spain. She was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant to study the effects of austerity on Southern European livelihoods (Grassroots Economics [GRECO]). Her main research focus has been on the anthropology of work, with particular attention to unregulated production and care practices within and across generations. Her work is inspired by theories of critical political economy, moral economies, feminist economics, and value regimes. She has been a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, President of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) and has served as Secretary of the American Anthropological Association. Recent writing addresses the themes of making a living in futures without employment, political mobilization, social reproduction, and class. Her most recent publication is “Rethinking the concept of labour”, JRAI, 2018.

Jane Schneider is Professor Emeritus from C.U.N.Y. Graduate center (2005), where she had been Professor of Anthropology since 1985.  Professor Schneider became an anthropologist after earning a degree in Political Theory from the University of Michigan and continued to straddle the two with her theoretical work and her fieldwork. After an early interest in textiles and in the world-system approach that led to seminal publications, she moved into a career of research on and in Sicily and to a fruitful partnership with Peter Schneider, which culminated in numerous publications, including, Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle in Palermo (2003). Currently, Jane Schneider is working on “contraband capitalism”–how this “mode of production” gained momentum from the U.S. “war on drugs,” and how it transformed criminal organizations around the world, with special attention to the Sicilian Mafia.

Sponsorship for this Series is generously provided by the New York Academy of Sciences, by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, by the Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, and by Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College.


The Pensioner’s Dilemma: Generations, Class, and Inequality in Southern Europe | Posted on February 22nd, 2019 | Public Programs