Forwarded message from Oxford University Anthropological Society
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Dear All,
What's the 'Matter' in Anthropology
Weds 13 May 2009
St Hugh's College, Oxford
Here is the full timetable for the Conference on 13th May, and the abstracts for all the
papers.
Further information and registration: [log in to unmask]
http://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/current-students/oxford-university-anthropological-
society/events/ouas-centenary-conference/
9.00-9.45 Registration
9.45 Penny Harvey Introductory note
10-10.40 Tim Ingold: Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative
Entanglements in a World of Materials
10.40-11 Question time
11.05-11.45 Dan Hicks and Laurie Wilkie: Going About Things: a view from
archaeology
11.45-12.05 Question time
12.05-1.05 Lunch
1.10 Danny Miller: What's the matter with relationships?
1.50-2.10 Question time
2.15-3.55 Steve Woolgar: The Wrong Bin Bag: ontological
politics and accountability relations
3.55-3.15 Question time
3.20-3.45 Coffee and Cake
3.45-4 Penny Harvey Discussing Themes Raised, and introducing
the Discussion
4.-5 Discussion All 4 speakers will be engaged in
dialogue, directed by Penny Harvey
5-5.15 Closing Remarks
Kind Regards,
Kate Fayers-Kerr
_________________________________________
Oxford University Anthropological Society
51 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE
email- [log in to unmask]
http://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/current-students/oxford-university-anthropological-society/
ABSTRACTS
Bringing Things Back to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials
Tim Ingold
University of Aberdeen
The creation of things, according to Aristotle, involves a bringing together of form
(morphe) and matter (hyle). In the subsequent history of western thought, the
hylomorphic model of creation has become ever more deeply embedded. Contemporary
discussions in fields ranging from anthropology and archaeology to art history and
material culture studies continue to reproduce its underlying assumptions. My aim is both
to expose these assumptions and to replace the model with an ontology that assigns
primacy to processes of formation as against their final products, and to the flows and
transmutations of materials as against states of matter. The argument has five
components. First, the inhabited world consists not of objects, considered as bounded,
self-contained entities, but of things, each a particular gathering of the threads of life.
Secondly, life has to be understood not as an interior animating force but as the
generative capacity of that encompassing field of forces and materials wherein forms
arise and are held in place. This notion of ‘life’ should not be confused with the concept of
‘agency’, which is a product of the same reduction that reduces things to objects. Thirdly,
a focus on life-processes required us to attend not to materiality as such, but to the
fluxes and flows of materials. We have to follow these flows, tracing the paths of form-
generation. Fourthly, to understand how these paths are creative, we must read creativity
‘forwards’, as an improvisatory joining in with formative processes, rather than
‘backwards’ as an abduction from a finished object to an idea in the mind of an agent.
Finally, the pathways along which improvisatory practice unfolds are not connections
between one thing and another but lines along which they continually come into being.
Thus the entanglement of things has to be understood literally and precisely, not as a
network of connections but as a meshwork of interwoven lines of growth and movement.
Going About Things: a view from archaeology
Dan Hicks (Oxford) and Laurie Wilkie (University of California, Berkeley)
How can two anthropological archaeologists contribute to the discussion, set out in the
conference abstract, about ‘relationships’ between ‘the material world’ and ‘the ‘person’?
Not, we imagine, in the manner that the conference organizers expect. Our paper is about
how things are formed: objects, landscapes, and theories.
Our argument falls across three sections. First, we want to take stock of the current
‘materiality debate’ in British social anthropology – the critique of material culture theory
from the perspective of what we might call, for lack of a better term ‘meshwork theory’ –
from which the conference abstract draws its inspiration. Central among the complaints
about material culture theory is that it is focused on ‘end products’ rather than ‘processes
of formation’. Archaeological thinking has been invoked in this debate. But we want to
interrogate the assumptions, which have characterized the materiality debate thus far,
about how archaeology and anthropology might understand things. In particular, we want
to call into question the idea that archaeology can be defined by its object of enquiry,
rather than according to the situated manner in which it puts methods into practice.
Archaeology and anthropology (along, perhaps, with STS) are united in this kind of
situated engagement in their creation of knowledge of the world. In interdisciplinary
conversations such as this conference, therefore, archaeology is best understood as a
way of ‘going about things’. At their best, we suggest, archaeology and anthropology show
how things are emergent in practice, rather than forming some kind of solid, fixed arena
for interdisciplinary exchanges about the ‘relationships’ or permeabilities between ‘social’
and ‘material’ worlds.
Second, we want to talk about how we, as anthropological archaeologists, might
understand the formation of things, using two examples from our own fieldwork. One –
the remains of a sugar estate landscape in the eastern Caribbean – will be discussed in
relation to meshwork theory’s model of dwelling. The other – beads thrown at the New
Orleans Mardi Gras – will be discussed in relation to dialectical models in material culture
theory. Despite appearing to operate at different scales of analysis, we shall argue that
our knowledge of these things – large landscapes and small beads – is formed through
precisely the same processes. In both cases, the practice archaeology makes no a priori
distinction between formation and end product.
Finally, we want to talk about the formation of theories. We want to suggest that theories
emerge in precisely the same manner as things, and that we must therefore understand
them as ethnographers and archaeologists in just the same ways. The alternative
perspectives of meshwork theory and material culture theory, and the alternative
abstractions of relational ‘dwelling’ or more intimate dialectics, are, we suggest, closer
than has been imagined. These theories are differently situated; but they require effort to
create and maintain them, and they do the same disciplinary work. This suggestion runs
counter to the representational impulse which meshwork theory and material culture
theory have in common. This representational impulse derives, we argue, from two
sources: the successes and legacies of modernist anthropological theory, and the status
of the materiality debate as the reception of ANT thinking, as it has developed since the
early 1990s after social constructivism, in social anthropology. We note here, as a
cautionary tale for social anthropology, the current construction of a new archaeological
theory which is known as the Symmetrical Archaeology, and which defines archaeology
as ‘the discipline of things’. An alternative is to acknowledge that archaeology and
anthropology are united in enacting worlds, rather than building grand theories for
representing the world and how it operates.
Returning to Edwin Ardener’s classic statement on social anthropology and the decline of
modernism, we shall suggest that the materiality debate might be reoriented by
rethinking the place of field practice. This conclusion seeks to turn both meshwork theory
and material culture theory inside-out. It involves moving from ‘the humility of things’
closer to what Donna Haraway would call acts of modest witnessing. It celebrates the
fine-grained ethnographies that have contributed to material culture studies (as distinct
from material culture theory). But more than anything, it requires us to rethink the calls
for postdisciplinarity in which meshwork theory and material culture theory have too
often been united in their studies of things.
What's the “matter” with relationships?
Daniel Miller
University College London
Abstract
The subject of this workshop could be summarised as asking the question, what is the
relationship between the relationship people have with things and the relationship people
have with people and the relationship things have with things? All of which suggests that
we really ought to investigate in more detail what, actually, we mean when we use and
overuse the word relationship. Is there a theory of the relationship itself that would be
helpful in disentangling some of this? The paper starts by exploring what seems
reasonable and unreasonable to describe as a `mobile phone relationship' It then explores
other areas where it seems that what matters is less the quality of, or the differences
between, materials, things or persons, but rather the nature and the quality of the
relationship. This may, in turn, provide some criterion for answering the question, when
does matter matter?
The Wrong Bin Bag: ontological politics and accountability relations
Steve Woolgar,
STS, Said Business School
University of Oxford
Abstract
Recent moves to incorporate materiality within the purview of social science are
welcome. They help extend the sorts of account which sociology, anthropology,
geography etc can provide. More interestingly, they bring into question some core
assumptions about what has previously counted as adequate social scientific analysis. But
such moves also come with considerable philosophical baggage, much of which has yet to
be exorcised. This paper explores some implications of different ways of “taking the
material into account”.
The paper examines how ordinary objects and technologies are implicated in governance
and accountability, drawing on examples from a study of recycling and waste
management; speeding and traffic control; passenger movement and security in airports.
The redistribution of accountability relations can be shown to be contingent upon
processes of ontological respecification. These processes amount to a form of ontological
politics. The paper also considers how connections between objects and their persons are
performed, for example in the contention that our lives are increasingly controlled or
mediated by, through, or in relation to, objects. These innocent locutions do significant
ontological politics, by invoking a vocabulary of quasi sociological relations which renders
the object devoid of agency. The paper concludes that we need an elaborated
understanding of ontological politics, one in which the assignation and denial of moral
agency defines both ontological status and distribution of accountability.
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