Professor Marilyn Strathern: Taking care of a concept: anthropological reflections on the assisted society Understanding Society

Professor Marilyn Strathern

Professor Marilyn Strathern will give the final lecture in a series of five lectures on Understanding Society. The series will culminate in a panel discussion at Kings Place on Tuesday 27 November 2012.

Abstract

This final lecture in the series takes on the issue of what seems one of the least appealing aspects of ‘society’, as the term is used in common parlance, namely its vacuousness, and suggests what an anthropologist might find interesting in that. Does the Big Society render the concept even more (as in bigger) vacuous? And if it does, what might be some of the consequences? The lecture questions both what might be taken for granted in an appeal to society and what it then means to promote it. If indeed there is no such thing, do these questions become more interesting, or less so? It is a conundrum that is best approached from a wider stage than ministerial pronouncements.