The Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture 2026: Harri Englund
Department of Social Anthropology are happy to announce that Professor Harri Englund, University of Cambridge, will give the Fredrik Barth Memorial Lecture 2026. The title for this year's lecture is "Climate Crisis Is a Crisis of Obligation".
Abstract:
Three international courts have recently issued advisory opinions that pronounce on the obligations of states in addressing the causes and effects of the climate crisis. They would seem to answer academic and popular calls to situate global warming in colonial legacies and contemporary inequalities. At the same time, the emphasis on obligation recalls social anthropology’s formative interests in the mid-twentieth century. What humans might owe to one another and to the other-than-human world is a pressing question in the climate crisis, but much has happened in social theory to reduce anthropologists’ attention to obligation. This lecture explores the extent to which rights discourses, personal ethics and posthumanism have variously put obstacles on the path to recovering obligation as one of the discipline’s core concerns. Combining the analysis of academic and African vernacular texts, the lecture draws inspiration from Fredrik Barth’s efforts to overcome analytical obstacles in his own time, from structural-functionalism to rational choice theories. His dynamic, generative approach to ‘the social’ may prove critical to repurposing the interest in obligation for the twenty-first century.
Professor Englund is a social anthropologist who studies obligations, rights and justice in their vernacular forms. This has involved field and archival research in various religious, economic, legal, and political contexts in Africa as well as on African-European relations. He was awarded a PhD in social anthropology by the University of Manchester in 1995 and held research fellowships at the Nordic Africa Institute and the Academy of Finland before joining the University of Cambridge in 2004. Englund was elected into the British Academy in 2019.
His key publications include Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African poor (University of California Press, 2006), Visions for Racial Equality: David Clement Scott and the Struggle for Justice in Nineteenth-Century Malawi (CUP 2022), the influential edited collection Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa (with F.B. Nyamnjoh, Zeed Books 2004) and a number of other influential books and articles.
