The time of the commons and the subject of the South

Professor Eric Worby from the Department of Anthropology will present this Senate Lecture.

Infused with nostalgia, fired by hope, the idea of ‘the commons’ has served to index a diffuse social intimacy unimpeded by private property - a way of organising social and material life that has been lost to modernity but that may yet underpin the imagination of a radically redefined future. The rhetorical invocation of ‘the commons’ has fueled a very wide range of political gestures and movements.  It has also animated a good deal of social thought concerned with locating the subject of the Global South – formerly figured as the ‘Native’ of colonial anthropological discourse – in historical or developmental time.  In this lecture, Worby will critically trace the intertwined political and intellectual career of ‘the commons’ concept in relation to temporality and the subject, drawing upon his own research over more than three decades in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and South Africa.

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