This talk is about the possibility, and the value, of knowing about people who are different from oneself. It is a critical analysis of cultural critic Susan Sontag’s review of photographer Diane Arbus’s 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting individuals whom Sontag regards as “ugly”, necessarily is exploiting them. I disagree. I argue that Arbus’s photographs (and academic disciplines like anthropology) instead subvert the smug, privileged protocol articulated by critics like Sontag, who seem prepared to contemplate “ugly” people, vastly different from themselves, but only through an optic of pity, or of vicarious indignation at the supposedly unrelentingly grim conditions under which such people are imagined to live their lives. The talk will be illustrated by Arbus’s photographs.

Don Kulick is Chair Professor of Anthropology at HKU and Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden. His books include A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea (2019); Loneliness and its Opposite: Sex, Disability and the Ethics of Engagement (with J. Rydström, 2015); Language and Sexuality (with D. Cameron, 2003) and Travesti: Sex, Gender and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (1998).

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT.