This Thursday, October the 24th (or, I guess, now that I’m on this side of the Atlantic, 24 October) I’ll be giving a presentation at 7:30 (19:30?) in the evening to EUNAS, the Edinburgh University North American Society; the talk will be held at lecture theatre 175, in the Old College.

The (working) title for the presentation is “America – will it ever end? Methodological problems in ‘cutting the network’ with the Nation-State.”  The abstract is below:

The United States of America is of interest as an analytic object in part due to its global reach, in terms of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power; but those same characteristics makes it difficult to know when, where, and how to circumscribe “America” as an analytic object, or to present any frame that is adequate to all the different and differential phenomena that comprise America’s internal heterogony. This talk examines the challenges, and also the opportunities, that arise when attempting to think both ethnographically and anthropologically about complex and influential late modern nation-states such as the United States of America.

I’ve given this talk informally before – but I’m excited at the challenge of giving it in this setting, and in front of this audience.