Dr Christopher Davis

Event details

Lecture title: Heart of Darkness and the Consolidations of the Laboratory

Date: 3 May 2007, 5.15pm

Venue: Room G8, Neurosciences, 1 George Square

Lecture abstract

This lecture is intended to be a work of thought. Taking anthropology as a discipline which is both a field science and a documentary art, I am interested in the contemporary relevance of a mode of ethnological practice which uses ethnographic facts as devices enabling us to think “otherwise”; that is, to change our understanding of and relationship to our own operating concepts.

In this instance, I begin from the concept of the crisis in general and the medical crisis in Africa in particular. The aim, as always, is the exploration of human originality (here represented in the context of an anthropology of medicine) - and of the changing positions and constitutions of medicine, the body and, indeed, of life itself as these are caught up in a globalised politics of morality.

Dr Christopher Davis is from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.