About Home
Fellows
Events Home
New Events
Events Venue
Lectures
Seminars
Publications Home
New Publications
Books
Monograph Archive
text only version   |   a A A   | 
Search this site: (powered by Google)
ICR Masthead

Events

Seminars

Agreeing to disagree, or why people share beliefs


Professor Peter Wade

Studies of group dynamics focus on what happens within a group - say a real or experimental group of prisoners and guards. But people come to a group with pre-existing ideas and experiences - what a prison is, what punishment is for, how guards and prisoners behave.

This talk will look at how broader cultural ideas become part of people's ways of thinking, even as people also disagree frequently and even violently about many things. It looks at "group" and group belonging at a wide level and addresses how diverse sets of people in a society, and across societies, may share some basic, taken-for-granted ideas. In some cases, these ideas (for example, about race or gender) may disadvantage some of the people who adhere to them.

Peter Wade did a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, focusing on the black population of Colombia. He was a Research Fellow at Queens' College Cambridge (1985-1988), before becoming a Lecturer in Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool (1988-1995).

He is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

His publications include BLACKNESS AND RACE MIXTURE (Johns Hopkins University Pres, 1993), RACE AND ETHNICITY IN LATIN AMERICA (Pluto Press, 1997), MUSIC, RACE AND NATION: MÚSICA TROPICAL IN COLOMBIA (Chicago University Press, 2000), and RACE, NATURE AND CULTURE: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE (Pluto Press, 2002).

Professor Wade's current research continues to focus on issues of racial and national identities in Latin America and on cultural hegemonies and processes of cultural appropriation in a globalising world.

Recently he has begun to focus on issues of racial identity, nature, culture and embodiment. He is interested in the fact that race is often defined by its reference to biology, 'blood,' genes, nature or essence, but that these concepts are often left unexamined.

In his most recent book, he integrates material from the history of science, science studies, and anthropological studies of kinship and new reproductive technologies, as well as from studies of race, in order to explore the meaning of such terms and interrogate the relationship between nature and culture in ideas about race.

He is currently involved in research projects focusing on the public understanding of genetics in relation to ideas about race and on e-government, netculture and the politics of ethnic identity.

back to the lectures list >>