Introduction of the Second Guest of Honor
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12th Igorot Cordillera BIMAAK-Europe (ICBE) Conference
ULB Campus du Solbosch, Bâtiment S, Salle Dupréel, Avenue Jeanne 44,
1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
29 May–1 June 2025
Introduction of the Second Guest of Honor
Written by Angelie Marilla and read by Marivonne Pumihic Cuyob
Cultural Gala – 31 May 2025 – Saturday Night
Our second Guest of Honor is the Director of the Anthropology Department—The Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, here at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He has graciously supported and collaborated with us for this conference. He is the author of "Modernity Bluff ," the highly acclaimed and well-cited book on the anthropology of consumption, which won the Amaury Talbot Prize for the most valuable work in African anthropology, and is based upon field research carried out for his doctorate at Cornell University.
While he continues to write about Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, most recently focusing on cybercrime and digital sorcery since 2007, he has also explored questions of domestic accumulation in US homes, developing publications on storage, hoarding, clutter, and possession. More recently, he has been investigating the material traces of Belgian colonialism, including monuments, museums, and domestic objects. His latest book published last year is entitled "Of Hoarding and Housekeeping: Material Kinship and Domestic Space in Anthropological Perspective." It is an edited collection of essays that aims to shift our understanding of hoarding and the rise of minimalism by placing them in the context of global economic transformations and practices across cultures.
His areas of expertise include magicality and witchcraft, semiotics, affect, urban sociality and popular culture, modernities, material culture, and of course, migration. We are honored to have with us tonight one of the most esteemed anthropologists in Europe.
Let us all welcome Professor Alexander "Sasha" Newell.