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TONIGHT
Everybody welcome, just turn up!
LIVE @UCLAnthropology and on ZOOM

Tues Mar 25, 6:30pm (London UTC)
Ivan Tacey on
'Serpentine Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural analysis of the Rainbow Serpent'

From Amazonia to Australia, rainbow snakes coil at the heart of the cosmologies of Indigenous peoples, embodying forces of creation, destruction, and renewal. Known variously as nagas, dragons, or rainbow serpents, these chthonic entities are intimately entangled with water, blood, women, and untamed power. Among Batek hunter-gatherers of Malaysia, as well as other Southeast Asian Indigenous communities, the violation of taboos—especially those linked to blood—is believed to incite the wrath of these beings who are said to unleash catastrophic floods capable of annihilating entire settlements.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Ivan Tacey examines the roles of rainbow serpents in Batek creation myths, rituals, and cosmological landscapes, comparing these traditions with similar narratives and practices from Amazonia and Australia. Offering a cosmopolitical analysis, Ivan critiques the limitations of New Animist approaches, proposing instead that the global prevalence of rainbow snakes in Indigenous cosmologies reflects a 'time-resistant syntax of myth and ritual,' as theorized in Knight, Power, and Watts’ model of human origins.

Lecturer at the University of Plymouth, Ivan will be speaking LIVE in the Daryll Forde, 2nd Floor of UCL Anthropology Dept, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H 0BW. Come in good time by 6:30pm before doors close please. You can also join on ZOOM ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak

Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism

"There has been an epochal shift: the possibility of a global climate crisis is now upon us. Pollution, the poison of pesticides, the exhaustion of natural resources, falling water tables, growing social inequalities – these are all problems that can no longer be treated separately."

"The effects of global warming have a cumulative impact, and it is not a matter of a crisis that will “pass” before everything goes back to “normal.” Our governments are totally incapable of dealing with the situation. Economic warfare obliges them to stick to the goal of irresponsible, even criminal, economic growth, whatever the cost. It is no surprise that people were so struck by the catastrophe in New Orleans. The response of the authorities – to abandon the poor whilst the rich were able to take shelter – is a symbol of the coming barbarism."
Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism, Goffey, A. (trans.), Open Humanities Press (2015) >>
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/in-catastrophic-times/

Stengers, Isabelle. Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, Muecke, S. (trans.), Polity Press (2018), PDF >>
https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1700760973-AnotherScienceIsPossible_A-IsabelleStengers.pdf

How ‘slow science’ can improve the way we do and interpret research
"For example, the slow scientist will stop to listen to an Indigenous person whose expertise is honed through intergenerational practice, before imposing a more abstract, more universal, “modern” solution to a problem." >>
https://theconversation.com/how-slow-science-can-improve-the-way-we-do-and-interpret-research-90168