Events

The next meeting of the Anthropology Research Seminar Series will be held on Friday, November 3, 2023 at 5 p.m. Markus Sattler will present his research on Accounting for re/production in the web of life of Armenian and Georgian enterprises.

Description:

The presentation will engage with enterprises in Armenia and Georgia, presenting an accounting framework that aims to a) make visible re/production across multiple sites and actors b) address the quality of socio-ecological relations.

With regard to sites and actors, it proposes to embed enterprises – and an according accounting framework – in the web of life (drawing on diverse/community economies, ecofeminism, commodity chain research). This encompasses a variety of often de- or unvalued but relationally connected participants in an enterprise’s web of life: households/communities, suppliers, non-humans.

With regard to the quality of socio-ecological relations, the presentation will provide ideas and insights how to account for, and revalue, the relations between participants in the web of life, paving the way for a polylogue between geography, accounting and anthropology.

Beyond expressing these relations in overtly critical terms of socio-ecological theft (unequal exchange, appropriation of unpaid domestic work, resource rents), the presentation will also zoom in to messy practices of mutuality that are visible in Armenian and Georgian enterprises. If we thus embrace the vibrancy of bonding arrangements (e.g. gifting and care beyond alienable commodity exchange) in the web of life, can we move towards an accounting practice nurturing experimental forms of kin-making in the ruins of socialist and capitalist modernity?

Short Bio:

Markus Sattler is a doctoral student and researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany since 2020. Previously, Markus studied political science, geography, and international relations in Bremen and Berlin. Since his first stay in Georgia in 2010, Markus has been interested in the contested and multiple geographies of the Caucasus. In his dissertation, Markus focuses on the world-making practices of peripherally located Armenian and Georgian enterprises.

The talk will be in English in zoom: https://shorturl.at/jGLU2

2023