The Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium typically meets 3:30 pm at in-person at 10 Sachem Street Room 105, unless otherwise noted.
Fall 2025
Huatse Gyal — October 14, 2024
Restoring Indigenous Relations of Land: Grassland Restoration, Tibetan Yaks, and More than Human Indigeneity
This talk details emergent and innovative forms of land restoration efforts in Tibet that prioritize land-based community building as an indispensable step in environmental protection. This research draws on nearly fifteen years of fieldwork in eastern Tibet and over a decade of involvement in community-led efforts to restore the vitality of land, language, and community in the region. It is informed by Critical Indigenous Studies scholars who see the revitalization of Indigenous ways of relating to land and language as essential to the mission of empowering Indigenous communities and unmaking settler colonialisms in small and specific ways. Amidst other examples, I highlight how a prominent Tibetan community leader and conservationist tapped into land-based Indigenous knowledge by utilizing yaks and their dung as natural fertilizers for land restoration. The talk aims to broaden our perspectives on conservation and Indigeneity in a world that encompasses more than just humans.
Dr. Huatse Gyal is an environmental anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He received his B.A in Anthropology from Reed College, and MA and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Gyal has contributed peer-reviewed articles to international journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Nomadic Peoples, and Ateliers d’anthropologie. He is the co-editor of the first English volume titled, Resettlement among Tibetan Nomads in China (2015) and recently co-edited a special issue of Yeshe: A Journal of Tibetan Literature, Art and Humanities entitled, Translating Across the Bardo: Centering the Richness of Tibetan Language in Tibetan Studies (2024). Dr. Gyal released his first feature length documentary film titled “Khata: Poison or Purity? in 2023.
Daniel Agbiboa — October 28, 2024
Taken For A Ride: Learning From Mobile Ethnography
Drawing on my body of research into urban precarity and violent insurgency in West and Central Africa, this talk will discuss the value of mobile ethnography as a theoretically informed mode of traveling with people in their everyday worlds. By centering the lived experience of everyday subjects as often one of encountering the state in motion (i.e., the state as a mobile entity), mobile ethnography constitutes a riposte to traditionally static approaches to doing fieldwork in the social sciences. Taking to the road—in particular, dwelling at checkpoints, bus terminals, and roundabouts located at the precarious and shifting margins of the state—enables us to actively observe the figure of the subject on the move, the circulation of power relations across space, and how place itself shapes the emotions, maneuvers, and arts of survival of a population that is stuck, yet always on the move to seize opportunities for self protection, advancement, and recognition.
Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard
University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center. He earned a PhD from the University of Oxford and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the intersection of violence and order, urban governance, mobility and mobilization, and planetary politics. His recent books include They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Mobility, Mobilization and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (University of Michigan Press, 2022). He is the recipient of several awards, including the Lee Ann Fujii Book Award, the ISA Peace Best Book Award, the Politics and Gender Best Article Award; and the James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award (Honorable Mention). In 2023, he received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award for his significant contributions to the study of urban politics. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, recipient of the Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award, and holder of the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award (2024-2026). He is currently on the Editorial Board of the African Studies Review and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, where he also serves as a Trustee.
Ryan Cecil Jobson — December 2, 2024
The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago
“The Petro-State Masquerade” considers how postcolonial political futures in the Caribbean nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago came to be staked to the market futures of oil, natural gas, and their petrochemical derivatives. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Jobson theorizes how the tenuous relationship between oil and political power—enshrined in the hyphenated form of the petro-state—is represented by postcolonial state officials as a Carnivalesque “masquerade of permanence” through the perpetual expansion of fossil fuel ventures. At the same time, low oil and gas prices, diminishing reserves, and renewable energy innovations threaten the viability of the Trinbagonian energy sector.
Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. His research is preoccupied with questions of energy, sovereignty, race, and capitalism in the Caribbean and the Americas. His first book manuscript, The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. His writing is featured in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Current Anthropology, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, and Small Axe.