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Dear Community, due to a late withdrawal, Adam Chau and I are looking for one extra participant for this workshop to be held at SOAS and St John’s College Cambridge 28-30 June 2017, and aimed to rethinking a number of anthropological categories through the paradigm of hospitality. CUMULUS: Hoarding, Hosting, Hospitality Conveners: Giovanni da Col (SOAS) and Adam Yuet Chau (FAMES, Cambridge). Other participants include: Maurice Bloch (LSE), Fabio Gygi (SOAS), Luiz Costa (Federal University Rio de Janeiro), Ellen Hertz (Neufchatel), Holly High (Sydney), Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge), Sasha Newell (Universitè Libre de Bruxelles), Andrew Shryock (Michigan), David Sneath (Cambridge), Stephan Feuchtwang (LSE), Angela Zito (NYU) Please find the poster attached or download here:https://ibb.co/gKbJRQ <https://ibb.co/gKbJRQ>. This joint SOAS (Centre for Ethnographic Theory) - Cambridge (St John’s College) workshop (nicknamed Cumulus) aims to bring together scholars who have been thinking about issues relating to hoarding/storing, hosting and hospitality to explore the following questions: 1) How might Inner and East Asia serve as fecund generators of anthropological theory, much like Amazonia and Melanesia did previously in the history of the discipline? 2) In what way the Inner and East Asian region constitute a ‘cultural zone’ unified by shared cultural logics surrounding ideas of hoarding/storing, hosting and hospitality;? and 3) What broader theoretical implications and conundrums are brought out by this new paradigm? (vis-à-vis James Scott’s notion of ‘Zomia’ and Jack Goody’s pioneering work in comparative history and his notion of “Eurasia” (cf. also Hann 2016)). As recently noted by Candea and Da Col (2012), one may wonder what anthropology might look like today, if Marcel Mauss had chosen hospitality rather than the gift as the subject of his 1924 treatise. This new theoretical interest promises to challenge in fundamental ways long-reigning anthropological paradigms premised on gift giving, exchange and reciprocity. What if hospitality rather constitutes the (cognitive, social, political) frame enabling and activating relations of sharing, giving or trading? Do the wide variations in evaluation of forms of hosting and hospitality leave any room for going beyond this variation, towards more general considerations? An important goal of the workshop would the reconfiguration and articulation of the category of “hospitality”, hitherto an umbrella term unable to analytically accommodate both symmetrical relationships of “conviviality” and “commensality”, the complexity of asymmetrical relations and "forms of attachment” (cf. Descola 2013) glossed as “hosting”, “visitation”, “mastery” as well as localized properties of “strangerhood” which, in Inner Asia for example, display sociocosmological variations falling well beyond the cosmopolitical and Judeo-Christian precept of ethical obligations towards the Stranger-Guest. Similar in scope to Mauss` original essay, the workshop aims to return to a broadly comparative perspective by proposing a heuristics experiment beginning on a “cultural zone”, Inner and East Asia, before moving towards a trans-regional evaluation. The methodological proposition is that some regions provide the opportunity to pursue particular problems in anthropological theory. Why, for example, in a geographic zone running from the Himalayas to Mongolia to Siberia do we find a surprising “propensity" for social practices related to hoarding (material as well as nonmaterial ‘things’), hosting and hospitality (involving spirits as well as humans); sacrifice to gain favour from a host or spirit master; and subjective concerns for accumulation, storage, hoarding, containership (with the notion of “house society” working on different scales, from the Mongolian tent to the Buddhist monastery) and related preoccupations with leakages and parasitism? Whereas anthropological inquiry in India often emphasised personhood and hierarchy as distinctive cultural concepts-cum-heuristics, Melanesianists posited exchange, and Amazonianists warfare and predation -- in Inner and East Asia personhood seems superseded by the predominance of an idea of masterhood, which transcends simple expression of relations of ownership, authority or domination and in replicated linguistically on different scales (e.g. the term zhu in Chinese, bdag in Tibetan; eedz in Mongolian and eezhen in other Turkic languages). The master/owner/host appears not only as a multi-scalar idea in social realms, as a way of conceptualising the ruler of a state, guardian of property, host, or manager of a household; it is also evidently a cosmological notion, spanning a vast range from spirit owner or master of a territory to the ‘masters’ of wild animal species, geological formations, or even human-made implements. Using the term “Cumulus” as an arbitrary, polythetic category encompassing and connecting ideas of hoarding cum storing, hosting cum hospitality and aggregations of things and people, this workshop aims to elaborate a framework that would enable future comparative research that would transcends the assumed boundaries of culture and regional studies. The workshop is restricted to invited speakers only; there will not be delegates. Papers (6,000-10,000 words) will be circulated one week in advance and must not be committed for publication elsewhere. The format will be a brief presentation (15 mins) from each participant, followed by 45 minutes of discussion. The organisers cannot cover travel expenses but will cover meals plus accommodation for non-European participants. Please send further queries and abstracts of the proposed papers to [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> and [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> by Sunday, May 21st. Selected Bibliography Bloch, Maurice. "Commensality and poisoning." Social research (1999): 133-149, also in his 2005 Essays in Cultural Transmission. London: Berg. Chau, Adam Yuet. 2004. “Hosting Funerals and Temple Festivals: Folk Event Productions in Contemporary Rural China.” Asian Anthropology 3: 39-70. ––––––. 2010. “Mao’s Travelling Mangoes: Food as Relic in Revolutionary China.” Past and Present supplement 5 “Relics and Remains”, edited by Alexandra Walsham; pp. 256-75. ––––––. 2014 "Household Sovereignty and Religious Subjectification: Comparing the Idiom of Hosting in Chinese and Christian Religious Cultures." In Studies in Church History (special issue on "The Church and the Household"), pp. 492-504. ––––––. Manuscript in preparation. “The Sovereign Host: China, Ritual, Theory” (based on the 2013 Wilde Lectures in Natural and Comparative Religion, University of Oxford) da Col, Giovanni. 2012a. “The Poisoner and the Parasite: Cosmoeconomics, Fear, and Hospitality among Dechen Tibetans.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (s1): 175-195. ––––––. 2012b. “Natural Philosophies of Fortune: Luck, Vitality, and Uncontrolled Relatedness.” Social Analysis 56 (1): 1-23. ––––––. Forthcoming. “Hospitality.” Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (1). Candea, Matei and Giovanni da Col, eds. 2012a. Special Issue: The Return to Hospitality: Strangers, Guests, and Ambiguous Encounters. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (supplement 1). Candea, Matei and Giovanni da Col. 2012b. “The Return to Hospitality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (supplement 1): 1-19. Costa, Luiz 2017. The Owners of Kinship: Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia. With a Foreword by Janet Carsten. Chicago: HAU Books. Descola, Philippe. 2012 "Beyond nature and culture: Forms of attachment. Translated by Janet Lloyd." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2.1: 447-471 Fausto, Carlos. 2008. "Too many owners: mastery and ownership in Amazonia." Mana 14/2 (329-366) Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2010. The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts: Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter. Gamble, Clive 2015. "The anthropology of deep history." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21/1:147-164. Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Prinecton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gregory, Christopher. 2014, “On Religiosity and Commercial Life: Toward a Critique of Cultural Economy and Posthumanist Value Theory.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 45-68. Hevia, James L. 1996. “Imperial Guest Ritual.” In Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Religions of China in Practice, pp. 471-87. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Herzfeld, Michael. "As in your own house’: hospitality, ethnography, and the stereotype of Mediterranean society." Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean (1987): 75-89. Humphrey, Caroline. 2012 “Hospitality and Tone: Holding Patterns for Strangeness in Rural Mongolia', Journal of Roayl Anthropological Institute 18 supplement 1 (special issue The Return to Hospitality: Strangers, Guests, and Ambiguous Encounters, edited by Matei Candea and Giovanni Da Col): 63-75. Kilroy-Marac, Katie. 2016. “A Magical Reorientation of the Modern: Professional Organizers and Thingly Care in Contemporary North America.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (3): 438–457. Newell, Sasha. 2014. “The Matter of the Unfetish: Hoarding and the Spirit of Possessions.” Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 185-213. Ortner, Sherry B. 1978. Sherpas Through Their Rituals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Overing, Joanna, and Alan Passes 2000. The anthropology of love and anger: the aesthetics of conviviality in native Amazonia. London and New York: Routledge. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. "The law of hospitality." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2.1 (2012): 501-517. Shryock, Andrew. 2004. “The New Jordanian Hospitality: House, Host, and Guest in the Culture of Public Display.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (1): 35-62. ––––––. 2008. “Thinking about Hospitality, with Derrida, Kant, and the Balga Bedouin.” Anthropos 103: 405-421. Shryock, Andrew and Daniel Lord Smail, eds. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sneath, David. "Transacting and enacting: corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia." Ethnos 71.1 (2006): 89-112. Yan, Yunxiang. "The Good Samaritan's new trouble: A study of the changing moral landscape in contemporary China1." Social Anthropology 17.1 (2009): 9-24. Younger, Paul. 2002. Playing Host to Deity: Festival Religion in the South Indian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zito, Angela. 1997. Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-Century China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Very best wishes, Giovanni da Col Centre for Ethnographic Theory, SOAS - University of London, Founder and Director of Publications HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (haujournal.org), Editor-in-Chief HAU Books (haubooks.org), Executive Publisher CONFIDENTIALITY AND WARNING NOTICE This email and any attachments to it may be confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. According to Italy's data protection code (Legislative Decree no. 196/2003) concerning privacy, the information contained in this e-mail, sent by an Italian citizen, is confidential and is intended for the addressee only. 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