G Beckett
Biographic Data
| ID | 43893 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Beckett |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Beckett |
| SIGNATURE | BECKETT G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8875-9374 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe , by Mark Schuller
Overture: Trouillot Remixed
Street Sovereigns: Young Men and the Makeshift State in Urban Haiti, by Chelsey L. Kivland
The Specificity of the Ordinary
In this essay, anthropologist Greg Beckett responds to Rivke Jaffe's, Nadège T. Clitandre's, and Jhon Picard Byron's critical engagements with his 2019 ethnography, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Beckett discusses issues of representation and form, how gender and age shape people's experience of crisis, the discourse of Haitian exceptionalism, and the need to rethink crisis in Haiti from the standpoint of the co…
Unlivable Life
Set against the backdrop of soaring inflation, rolling blackouts, fuel riots, roadblocks, and antigovernment protests, this essay explores a new language of political crisis in Haiti that draws on the concept of unlivable life. In so doing, it seeks to directly connect political responses to crisis, such as protests over the high cost of living or government corruption, with ordinary or seemingly banal disasters, such as a capsized boat that led …
There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince
The Banality of Care: The Figure of the Humanitarian, in Haiti and Elsewhere
The humanitarian is often seen as the great moral figure of our time. In this article, I explore how the idea of the humanitarian, as a global public figure, is related to broader ideas of liberalism, agency, ethics, and care. I draw on ethnographic examples from Haiti to first paint a portrait of the humanitarian as a person concerned with certain ideas of care, suffering, and salvation. I then offer a more general theoretical account of the fig…
Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures by Kasia Mika
Reviewed by: Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures by Kasia Mika Greg Beckett Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures. By Kasia Mika. London: Routledge, 2019. ISBN 978-1138300750. 234 pp. US $140, hardcover. It has been ten years since an earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. In the decade that has followed the disaster, much has been written about the event and its aftermath, even thou…
The Politics of Disjuncture, or Freedom from a Caribbean Point of View
This essay offers a critical discussion of Yarimar Bonilla's Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015). It argues that Bonilla's account of labor politics in the French Department of Guadeloupe provides us with new ways of thinking about freedom and about politics in the Caribbean more broadly. The Caribbean region has been characterized as a place of political tragedy, in the wake of the repeated failu…
The abolition of all privilege: Race, equality, and freedom in the work of Anténor Firmin
Anthropology has done much to challenge the idea of the natural inferiority of races, but at times this challenge has ignored the problem of racism. This article explores an important but largely ignored foundational text about race and equality written by Anténor Firmin, a Haitian intellectual who in 1885 set out to critique the categories and concepts of nineteenth-century French anthropology. I show how Firmin's critique of race thinking and t…
A Dog's Life: Suffering Humanitarianism in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
In the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most residents are dependent on humanitarian and foreign assistance for food, services, aid, and jobs. Yet, some residents feel that the conditions under which such aid is provided actively blocks their ability to live a life they find meaningful. In this article, I explore how some Haitians theorize this humanitarian condition through the figure of the dog, an animal that exemplifies, for Hai…
The Politics of Emergency
Military and humanitarian interventions have become commonplace in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian…
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti Greg Beckett It is because of this element of the "miraculous" present in all reality that events, no matter how well anticipated in fear or hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once they have come to pass. The very impact of the event is never wholly explicable; its factuality transcends in principle all anticipation. Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?" The events that shook up Saint-Do…
Thinking with Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West
This essay explores the significance of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's final work, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World . It posits that Trouillot's argument contains three key claims. First, that anthropology is predicated on a problematic alterity, a way of thinking about otherness and difference constituted in relation to the universal unmarked category of the West. Second, that this relation between anthropology and alterity ca…
Bon Papa: Haiti's Golden Years - by Diederich, Bernard
U.W.O.A.S Symposium Abstracts 2000
Culture in Social Theory
This article explores the place of an anthropological concept of culture in contemporary social theory more broadly. The concept of culture in Marxist social theory is explored with an emphasis on the questions of determination, social reproduction, and the problem of social action and agency. Drawing on works from cultural Marxists such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, this article argues for a theory of cultural mediation as key to social r…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
William J. Peace — Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology; David H. Price — Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
Causes of death among persons reported with Aids
OBJECTIVES. This study describes causes of death in persons with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and assesses the completeness of reporting of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or AIDS on death certificates of persons with AIDS. METHODS. AIDS case reports were linked with death certificates in 11 local/state health departments; underlying and associated causes of death were available for 32,513 persons with AIDS who died. RES…
Kirsch, Stuart, Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text
A Dog's Life: Suffering Humanitarianism in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
In the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most residents are dependent on humanitarian and foreign assistance for food, services, aid, and jobs. Yet, some residents feel that the conditions under which such aid is provided actively blocks their ability to live a life they find meaningful. In this article, I explore how some Haitians theorize this humanitarian condition through the figure of the dog, an animal that exemplifies, for Hai…
Causes of death among persons reported with Aids
OBJECTIVES. This study describes causes of death in persons with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and assesses the completeness of reporting of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or AIDS on death certificates of persons with AIDS. METHODS. AIDS case reports were linked with death certificates in 11 local/state health departments; underlying and associated causes of death were available for 32,513 persons with AIDS who died. RES…
Thinking with Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West
This essay explores the significance of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's final work, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World . It posits that Trouillot's argument contains three key claims. First, that anthropology is predicated on a problematic alterity, a way of thinking about otherness and difference constituted in relation to the universal unmarked category of the West. Second, that this relation between anthropology and alterity ca…
Unlivable Life
Set against the backdrop of soaring inflation, rolling blackouts, fuel riots, roadblocks, and antigovernment protests, this essay explores a new language of political crisis in Haiti that draws on the concept of unlivable life. In so doing, it seeks to directly connect political responses to crisis, such as protests over the high cost of living or government corruption, with ordinary or seemingly banal disasters, such as a capsized boat that led …
The Politics of Emergency
Military and humanitarian interventions have become commonplace in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian…
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti Greg Beckett It is because of this element of the "miraculous" present in all reality that events, no matter how well anticipated in fear or hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once they have come to pass. The very impact of the event is never wholly explicable; its factuality transcends in principle all anticipation. Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?" The events that shook up Saint-Do…
The abolition of all privilege: Race, equality, and freedom in the work of Anténor Firmin
Anthropology has done much to challenge the idea of the natural inferiority of races, but at times this challenge has ignored the problem of racism. This article explores an important but largely ignored foundational text about race and equality written by Anténor Firmin, a Haitian intellectual who in 1885 set out to critique the categories and concepts of nineteenth-century French anthropology. I show how Firmin's critique of race thinking and t…
Kirsch, Stuart, Engaged Anthropology: Politics beyond the Text
Causes of death among persons reported with Aids
OBJECTIVES. This study describes causes of death in persons with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and assesses the completeness of reporting of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or AIDS on death certificates of persons with AIDS. METHODS. AIDS case reports were linked with death certificates in 11 local/state health departments; underlying and associated causes of death were available for 32,513 persons with AIDS who died. RES…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
William J. Peace — Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology; David H. Price — Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
U.W.O.A.S Symposium Abstracts 2000
Culture in Social Theory
This article explores the place of an anthropological concept of culture in contemporary social theory more broadly. The concept of culture in Marxist social theory is explored with an emphasis on the questions of determination, social reproduction, and the problem of social action and agency. Drawing on works from cultural Marxists such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, this article argues for a theory of cultural mediation as key to social r…
Bon Papa: Haiti's Golden Years - by Diederich, Bernard
The Politics of Emergency
Military and humanitarian interventions have become commonplace in recent years, provoking some to suggest that the right to intervene in the face of an emergency has become a new global norm. Emergencies and interventions pose unique challenges for political and legal theories of sovereignty, legitimacy, and democracy. Political anthropologists and other social scientists have focused on critiques of sovereign power and military and humanitarian…
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti Greg Beckett It is because of this element of the "miraculous" present in all reality that events, no matter how well anticipated in fear or hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once they have come to pass. The very impact of the event is never wholly explicable; its factuality transcends in principle all anticipation. Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?" The events that shook up Saint-Do…
Thinking with Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West
This essay explores the significance of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's final work, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World . It posits that Trouillot's argument contains three key claims. First, that anthropology is predicated on a problematic alterity, a way of thinking about otherness and difference constituted in relation to the universal unmarked category of the West. Second, that this relation between anthropology and alterity ca…
The Politics of Disjuncture, or Freedom from a Caribbean Point of View
This essay offers a critical discussion of Yarimar Bonilla's Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015). It argues that Bonilla's account of labor politics in the French Department of Guadeloupe provides us with new ways of thinking about freedom and about politics in the Caribbean more broadly. The Caribbean region has been characterized as a place of political tragedy, in the wake of the repeated failu…
The abolition of all privilege: Race, equality, and freedom in the work of Anténor Firmin
Anthropology has done much to challenge the idea of the natural inferiority of races, but at times this challenge has ignored the problem of racism. This article explores an important but largely ignored foundational text about race and equality written by Anténor Firmin, a Haitian intellectual who in 1885 set out to critique the categories and concepts of nineteenth-century French anthropology. I show how Firmin's critique of race thinking and t…
A Dog's Life: Suffering Humanitarianism in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
In the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, most residents are dependent on humanitarian and foreign assistance for food, services, aid, and jobs. Yet, some residents feel that the conditions under which such aid is provided actively blocks their ability to live a life they find meaningful. In this article, I explore how some Haitians theorize this humanitarian condition through the figure of the dog, an animal that exemplifies, for Hai…
There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince
The Banality of Care: The Figure of the Humanitarian, in Haiti and Elsewhere
The humanitarian is often seen as the great moral figure of our time. In this article, I explore how the idea of the humanitarian, as a global public figure, is related to broader ideas of liberalism, agency, ethics, and care. I draw on ethnographic examples from Haiti to first paint a portrait of the humanitarian as a person concerned with certain ideas of care, suffering, and salvation. I then offer a more general theoretical account of the fig…
Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures by Kasia Mika
Reviewed by: Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures by Kasia Mika Greg Beckett Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti's Futures. By Kasia Mika. London: Routledge, 2019. ISBN 978-1138300750. 234 pp. US $140, hardcover. It has been ten years since an earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. In the decade that has followed the disaster, much has been written about the event and its aftermath, even thou…
Unlivable Life
Set against the backdrop of soaring inflation, rolling blackouts, fuel riots, roadblocks, and antigovernment protests, this essay explores a new language of political crisis in Haiti that draws on the concept of unlivable life. In so doing, it seeks to directly connect political responses to crisis, such as protests over the high cost of living or government corruption, with ordinary or seemingly banal disasters, such as a capsized boat that led …
Overture: Trouillot Remixed
Street Sovereigns: Young Men and the Makeshift State in Urban Haiti, by Chelsey L. Kivland
The Specificity of the Ordinary
In this essay, anthropologist Greg Beckett responds to Rivke Jaffe's, Nadège T. Clitandre's, and Jhon Picard Byron's critical engagements with his 2019 ethnography, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Beckett discusses issues of representation and form, how gender and age shape people's experience of crisis, the discourse of Haitian exceptionalism, and the need to rethink crisis in Haiti from the standpoint of the co…
Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe , by Mark Schuller
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works)