Roundtable on the Anthropology of Life, w/Perig Pitrou (Maison Française d’Oxford/Collège de France)

Perig Pitrou is an anthropologist, and a CNRS senior researcher at the Maison Française d'Oxford. He leads the team “Anthropology of Life” in the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres. After an M.A in philosophy at the University Sorbonne Paris I, he obtained a PhD in Anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Pitrou's book explores the concept of "life" in a wide range of ethnographical manifestations and theoretical elaborations. Pitrou has conducted extensive ethnographic research among the Mixe people, an Amerindian group living in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. The main focus of this work is to explore how local knowledge practices concerning the vital processes of living phenomena such as growth, degeneration, reproduction, etc., are intricately interrelated with the nonhuman entities that produce them.

From this work, Pitrou has extended the concept of "life" to be the epistemological prism through which one can understand a wide variety of phenomena that in one way or another are expressions of life, as well as understanding how "life" as a concept is produced in our own knowledge discourses, such as in Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and Biopolitics.

There will be an introduction by PhD candidate in social anthropology, Nils Haukeland Vedal, followed by a discussion led by Associate Professor Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme, with plenty of time for an interesting dialogue.

Abstract of the book:
All over the world, humans observe phenomena such as birth, reproduction, growth, aging and death in their bodies and in the living beings around them. Faced with the influence exerted by these phenomena, all societies are developing knowledge and techniques to better understand them and seek to partially control them, in practices such as agriculture, livestock breeding and therapeutic interventions. This collective effort to “socialize life” and the powers it exercises varies according to environments and social organizations. There is a set of facts there, at the intersection between nature and culture, on which anthropologists carry out ethnographic investigations to compare conceptions of life according to socio-technical contexts. A research program then emerges to address the multiplicity of social organizations as so many collective enterprises set up to interact with the powers of life and develop means of action relating to the fragility of human lives. To begin to explore this area, within the framework of an “anthropology of life”, this book takes a synthetic look at the approaches developed by the discipline to study these questions: ethnology of non-Western societies, studies in science and technology, anthropology of the ordinary and biopolitics, ecologies of life.

All are welcome!