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Paris: Anthropologie de l’Imagination – 2018 Small Workshop Series

Our second workshop with Patricia Spyer and Iza Kavedžija will be on
Wednesday 25 April at 2:30 pm!

Musée de quai Branly – Jacques Chircac
37 quai Branly, 75007 Paris
Info: [log in to unmask]

Read more about the workshop series:
<https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfwlk10nawzc12m/imagination%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0>
Access the abstracts here: <https://www.dropbox.com/s/xjy
9wu8jbe5pd5p/Severi%20da%20Col%20Imagination%202017%20abstra
cts%20final.pdf?dl=0)> Organisateurs Carlo Severi, Directeur d’études à
l’EHESS Giovanni da Col, Centre for Ethnographic Theory, SOAS a. Mercredi
25 Avril 14h30-18h, Salle de Cinéma "Image, Infrastructure, Imagination"
Patricia Spyer (Graduate Institute Geneva)

"The Narrow Road to the Interior: Contemporary Japanese Artists and
the Emergent Imagination"
Iza Kavedžija (University of Exeter)

b.  Vendredi 22 Juin 14h30 – 18h, Salle de Cinéma
"Imaginary Reciprocity: Vietnamese Rituals for Displaced Souls"
Heonik Kwon (Trinity College, Cambridge)

"Affixing Souls, Fixing the Social: Ten Years after Ghosts of War in Vietnam"
Paul Sorrentino (Centre Asie du Sud-Est, EHESS)

**

Image, Infrastructure, Imagination

Patricia Spyer (Graduate Institute Geneva)

This presentation explores two distinct forms of exercising
thought emergent in the religiously inflected violence that racked the
provincial capital of Ambon in Maluku, eastern Indonesia, in the early
2000s. A key component of violence’s sedimentation in the city was
what I call ‘the infrastructure of imagination’ comprising the
representations, mobilizations, and effects of a range of media forms,
including print and, to a lesser degree, electronic media, but
especially ‘tactical’ varieties such as incendiary pamphlets,
pro-peace Public Service Announcements, graphically violent Video CDs
produced by Christians and Muslims alike, graffiti, rumors,

and shadowy figures like the provocateur held to haunt the terrain of
war and incite violence. The breakdown of trust in familiar
appearances, the revamping of criteria of credibility, and the
emergence of knowledge forms that blurred the boundary between what
was feared and what was fantasized--making everyday
things appear bizarre and grotesque. Within such a ‘fog of war’--to
borrow an expression from the Prussian military theorist, Carl von
Clausewitz--forms of thinking prospered that made of the cleavage
between appearances and the visible and what lies behind them a
regulating trope. My second example focuses on the
bringing-into-vision of the Christian God on the part of members of
Ambon’s aniconic Protestant elite who threw up a gallery of billboards
and
murals around the wartime city in what constituted a nostalgic attempt
to safeguard their privileges, a demand for recognition by authority
in the wake of the Suharto state’s collapse, and the desire for a more
proximate relationship to the Christian god experienced as
increasingly out of reach. Imagining a more intimate relationship to
the divine occasioned an extension and transformation of the terrain
of the visual, a novel mode of mediating transcendence, and—in more
practical terms--the Christianizing of urban space via the pictures--a
space, as many Protestants perceived, under aggressive
erasure by Muslims.

The Narrow Road to the Interior:

Contemporary Japanese Artists and The Emergent Imagination

Iza Kavedžija (University of Exeter)

When asked to reflect on their own creative practice, contemporary
artists in Osaka would frequently invoke images of movement. In lieu
of a preformed mental image or plan, they would emphasise the
processual and emergent nature of creating a work of art and the
importance of moving one’s body, likening the gradual and meandering
nature of their understanding to a ‘path’.
At the same time, they would often compare their own lives to a path,
albeit one with a far less visible endpoint than that which lay ahead
of practitioners of the traditional Japanese arts. Along this
particular life path, one must move without a clear idea of where one
is headed; the path is laid down as one moves along it. By exploring
the multiple parallels and intersections between creating an artwork
and composing a life, my aim in this paper is to shed light
on the emergent yet embodied qualities of the imagination as well as
the ways in which the imagination may be cultivated through forms of
training. I suggest that interiority, or inner life, although often
described as a sort of inner conversation with oneself, can and often
does take a non-dialogical form; and that peoples’ imaginations –
including their imagination of their own selves – may be mediated by
the particular techniques in which they are enskilled. Attention to
these techniques may thus enlarge our understanding of
non-narrative ways of knowing.

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