On September 30, at 5:00 PM (Tbilisi time), the Anthropology Research Center and the Doctoral Program in Anthropology at Ilia State University will host an online lecture by Dr. Amiel Bize from Cornell University, titled “Forest Leftovers: Wood Gathering and the Idea of the ‘Rural Poor.’”

In this talk, Amiel Bize uses the gathering of forest products by villagers in East Africa as a starting point for examining entitlements and enclosure. Drawing on Marx’s early writings on fallen wood, the history of forest policy in East Africa, and ethnographic research in Kenya, she argues that debates over forest access serve as a crucial site where ideas about “the rural poor” are elaborated.

Amiel Bize is an economic anthropologist whose work examines social and economic transformations at the margins of global capitalism. Her current book project explores how people create and contest value in a “post-agrarian” rural world. Based on long-term fieldwork in western Kenya, the project traces how former farmers—living amid decades of rural abandonment and restructuring—navigate shifting relationships with worth, kinship, labor, and nature in the wake of economic liberalization.

Working Language: English

Date and Time: September 30, 5:00 PM (Tbilisi time)

Format: Online via Zoom (link will be provided upon request florian.muehlfried@iliauni.edu.ge)

Attendance: Free and open to the public