I wonder if anyone on the list would be interested in taking part in a
session I am organising for this year's TAG? Equally if you can think of
anyone not of a CHAT disposition I'd be pleased if you would pass this on.
Paul Graves-Brown
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Ephemerality: The Archaeology of Transience
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
In the long run all things that humans create are ephemeral, as Shelley
reminds us. Our sense of permanence relates to the scale of our
lifetime. Children (if they're lucky) live in a reassuringly unchanging
world. Only as we grow older do we realise that the world is in constant
flux. That which we experience, as William James suggested, is a stream
of consciousness which we segment in order to lend it some sense or
coherence. But the sense of disruption brought about by change also has
a political dimension; in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
lament that;
All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. *All that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned*, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his
kind.
Similar sentiments are found in Victor Hugo’s reactions to Hausmann’s
Paris and more recently in Marshall Berman’s _All That Is Solid Melts
Into Air: The Experience of Modernity._ (1982).
This session will consider the way in which some structures that appear
permanent are not, and how what may have never been intended to persist
becomes a permanent landmark. Indeed, are ephemeral elements such as
cranes, scaffolding or graffitti integral to what is otherwise supposed
to be the permanent, pristine landscape? What is it that gives us the
sense that things _are_ permanent in the first place? How do notions of
permanence and ephemerality apply at different times and in different
cultures (e.g. settled vs. nomadic groups)? Why is modernity seen as a
time of constant change, in contrast to a slower, more stable past, and
is this true?
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