***with apologies for cross-posting****



I would like to invite you to the second session of the Unit of Play’s Pluralistic Variations lecture series, with Professor Morten Axel Pedersen (University of Copenhagen), who will be discussing pluralistic experimentation and critique in connection to the ontological turn in anthropology. The event is free, and everyone is welcome! I’d love to see as many of you there as possible!



1st Dec 2016 | 4.30-6.30pm | Profesor Stuart Hall Building 302, Goldsmiths, University of London. New Cross, SE14 6NW

Experiment as Anthropological Critique: Pluralistic Tales from Two Collaborative Events

Prof. Morten Axel Pedersen (University of Copenhagen)

Discussant: Prof Daniel Neyland (Sociology)



This lecture is concerned with the role of experimentation in anthropology's ontological turn (OT). Drawing on my role in two recent collaborative experiments - the Comedy of Things and the Social Fabric  - I explore how new forms of pluralistic thinking and doing emerge when different disciplines and disparate fields of practice are brought together within an explicitly experimental design. On this basis I argue that, rather than a rapturous new beginning, OT pursues anthropology's inherently self-experimental impulse to its necessary conclusion. This involves not just experimenting with what ethnographic fieldwork and field sites may be, or with what a fieldworker and an interlocutor might be. It also – and above all – experiments with what an anthropological concept and an anthropological theory might be. In taking postmodernist anthropology’s call for reflexivity and cultural critique to the extreme, OT thus allows for an experimental extension of anthropology’s self-experimental habitus from the so-called ethnographic dimension of ‘the field’ into the so-called theoretical dimension of ‘analysis’ itself (which is another way of saying that OT amounts to a sustained experiment with what a concept, and indeed an experiment, could be). By treating what is sometimes imagined as spatio-temporally distinct empirical and theoretical ‘stages’ of anthropological research as analogous components of one undifferentiated ethnographic procedure, OT takes the injunction towards anthropological (self) experimentation to its endpoint. As such, OT transforms cultural critique into conceptual creativity without losing its critical edge and reflexive impetus. For ontologically inclined anthropologists seek to render their own thoughts (and thus their own concepts) subject to the same degree – and ideally, the same kind – of experimental intervention as subjects whose social life they study in their field sites, including their own life as ethnographic fieldworkers. Ideally, this is what allows the ethnographic contingencies that emerge from fieldwork to transform perpetually the very concepts that one uses to describe and analyse these ethnographic materials anthropologically – self-experimentation, that is, all the way down.







Series Organiser: Dr Martin Savransky

















Dr. Martin Savransky

Lecturer | Department of Sociology

Director, Unit of Play (UoP)

Goldsmiths, University of London

London SE14 6NW



[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

Goldsmiths Staff Website<http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/savransky-martin/>

<http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/MartinSavransky>Academia.edu Website <http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/MartinSavransky>



Book Reviews Editor: Science as Culture<http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/csac20/current>



New in Hardback: T<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adventure-Relevance-Ethics-Social-Inquiry/dp/1137571454/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467049493&sr=8-1&keywords=the+adventure+of+relevance>he Adventure of Relevance<https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adventure-Relevance-Ethics-Social-Inquiry/dp/1137571454/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467049493&sr=8-1&keywords=the+adventure+of+relevance> (Palgrave Macmillan 2016, with a foreword by Isabelle Stengers).















*************************************************************

*           Anthropology-Matters Mailing List

*  http://www.anthropologymatters.com            *

* A postgraduate project comprising online journal,    *

* online discussions, teaching and research resources  *

* and international contacts directory.               *

* To join this list or to look at the archived previous       *

* messages visit:                                             *

* http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML   *

* If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all    *

* those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to:   *

*        [log in to unmask]                  *

*                                                             *

*       Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new        *

*       CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com        *

*    an international directory of anthropology researchers

*

* To unsubscribe: please log on to jiscmail.ac.uk, and            *

* go to the 'Subscriber's corner' page.                                  *

*

***************************************************************