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Forthcoming Events: Don't Forget to Register!
1. Announcing a workshop to be held at the Centre for Ethnographic Theory,
SOAS - University of London on 29 June 2018: "The Futures of Magic"
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The futures of magic: Ethnographic theories of unbelief, doubt, and opacity
in contemporary worlds
Register on Eventbrite! <
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-futures-of-magic-tickets-46353545703>
Speakers: Peter, Pels (Leiden), Fiona Bowie (King's), Chloe Nahum-Claudel
(LSE), Julien Bonhomme (ENS), Helen Cornish (Goldsmiths) and Graham Jones
(MIT).
Discussant: Giovanni da Col (SOAS).
Convenors: Richard Irvine and Theodoros Kyriakides (The Open University)
This one-day workshop which accompanies the project "Magical thinking in
contexts and situations of unbelief" sets out to explore the relationship
between unbelief, doubt and opacity and magic as enacted in contemporary
societies. Understood as a consistent trait of human sociality and
cognition by which people make sense of the world, currently undergoing
radical refiguring, magic presents an ideal lens to survey the manner by
which contemporary trajectories of belief, religion and spirituality
presently unfold. An important question is to explore the manner by which
entanglements of magical traditions and secular/atheist discourses produce
cognitive and social bifurcations, compartmentalisations or amalgamations
in the religious bodies of knowledge which people use to understand and
navigate social circumstance and uncertainty. Combining anthropological
literature on magic with studies of non-religion, doubt, opacity and
unbelief, we have set out to explore the contexts, occasions, and objects
through which everyday understandings of causality and reasoning which can
be understood as magical occur in contemporary societies.
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2. The 2018 small workshop series on the anthropology of imagination
Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/lfwlk10nawzc12m/imagination%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0)
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Read the talk abstracts here (
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xjy9wu8jbe5pd5p/Severi%20da%20Col%20Imagination%202017%20abstracts%20final.pdf?dl=0
)
Our third workshop with Heonik Kwon and Paul Sorrentino will be held on
Friday 22 June at 2.30 pm. All Welcome!
Musée de quai Branly – Jacques Chircac
37 quai Branly, 75007 Paris
Info: [log in to unmask]
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3. Network for Ethnographic Theory Panel at the European Association of
Social Anthropologist (EASA 2018) in Stockholm
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Xenophilia: new departures in the anthropology of hospitality and
strangerhood (double panel) (
https://nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2018/conferencesuite.php/panels/6688)
Convened by: Marianna Keisalo (Aarhus), Claudio Sopranzetti (Oxford),
Giovanni da Col (SOAS), Theodoros Kyriakides (Open University UK).
With John Borneman (Princeton), Arjun Appadurai (NYU), Heath Cabot
(Pittsburgh), Ivan Rajković (Max Planck Institute), Deborah Tooker (Le
Moyne College), Farhan Samanani (Oxford), Ed Pulford (Hokkaido University),
Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths), Mario Schmidt and Sebastian Schellhaas, Tuhina
Ganguly (Shiv Nadar University, India)
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4. Roundtable on Anthropology and the Imagination with Tim Ingold at the
Association of Social Anthropology (ASA) conference 2018
18-21 September, University of Oxford
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This year's conference theme is: "Sociality, matter, and the imagination:
re-creating Anthropology”.
The Roundtable (sponsored by the ASA) will be held on Wednesday 19
September from 6 to 7.30 pm in the Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford.
Chair: Dolores Martinez.
Speakers: Tim Ingold, Lisette Josephides, Giovanni da Col, Signe Howell.
Early Bird Registration <
https://www.theasa.org/conferences/asa18/registration.shtml> for the
conference will be available from June 6th to July 16th.
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5. Announcing the Stephen F. Gudeman Lectureship in Anthropology at the
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, to be published in HAU!
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The Gudeman Lectureship in Anthropology is a new series that will be hosted
by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota-Twin
Cities in honor of the many years Stephen F. Gudeman was a faculty member
who worked in its intellectually open and supportive environment. The
Lectureship is meant as a stage for talks in Social and Cultural
Anthropology that focus on the following topics: economies in relation to
their social contexts, the wider effects of economy on society, the use of
ethnography in the study of contemporary life, and the impact of
ethnographic research on social theory.
The first Gudeman Lecture will be given by Adam Kuper on Monday, 1 October
2018.
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Deconstructing Anthropology
Anthropology started out as the science of the savage. It has become the
science of the Other. The Other is our opposite number, our alter-ego,
ourselves turned upside down. The savage was the last free man, perhaps –
at one with nature and the spirit world, an intuitive artist. For Darwin,
however, he was little better than an animal; for Lévy-Bruhl, he was
pre-logical; in Freudian fantasy, he was polymorphically promiscuous. He
has been represented as the binary opposite of Economic Man by Malinowski
and Mauss – and, sometimes, by Gudeman.
I will invite you to deconstruct anthropology’s most venerable avatars: the
savage, the primitive, the tribesman, the indigenous; the man of culture
and the civilized person; the rationalist and the irrationalist; the
individual and the “dividual”. Perhaps we can then make a start on the
reconstruction of the discipline.
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6. ADAK: The Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords
2018 Anthropological Keyword:
ATTENTION
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Webb Keane (Michigan), Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford), Tom Boellstorff (UC
Irvine), Emmanuel Grimaud (CNRS), Shalini Shankar (Northwestern), Natasha
Dow Schüll (NYU)
Editors/Organisers: Giovanni da Col, Grégory Delaplace, Carole McGranahan
How do humans and non-humans attract, divert, focus or capture one’s
attention? At a time when public interest, social media, and corporate
strategies are dominated by concerns over an “attention economy,” an
ex-Google strategist claims we are facing “the largest, most standardised
and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.
Anthropology is uniquely positioned to address the ways attention and
distraction economies erode human will, limit the capacity to focus, and
generate new forms of addictions through elaborated algorithms, persuasive
designs, and triggers. Since its foundation, our discipline has inquired
into what properties makes a ritual persuasive and effective, frame
different realities, distinguish an event from the everyday, an omen or
supernatural sign from a random happenstance, and which conditions of
relevance and salience ground the very fabric of human sociality. The
transmission of religious ideas and the very essence of religion have been
connected to attention-grabbing pragmatic and cognitive constellations:
“sticky" and “catchy” representations have been showed to embed
contradictory principles or to violate cognitively intuitive expectations.
Mindtraps, decoys, games, or magic tricks can be objects of ethnographic
scrutiny not only as entry points into human intelligence and cunning, but
also and more profoundly as world-making technologies whereby environments
are created or tweaked in order to create new affordances for different
kinds of beings: spirits to be stopped, animals to be lured into death or
cooperation, audiences to be amazed or surprised or youths to be initiated.
Attention – its unequal distribution or its gradual acquisition through
apprenticeship – is indeed the key to discoverable realms: game that
becomes visible to a hunter, matter that becomes sensible to a potter,
riddles and jokes and puns that become revelatory to an initiate, or
culture that becomes translatable to an ethnographer. As humans navigate
through constellations of beings endowed with different perceptive and
affective propensities, anthropologists cultivate ways to attend to
relations created or made impossible at the meeting point of heterogeneous
regimes of attention. This year’s Annual Debate on Anthropological Keywords
aims to bring attention to the forefront of anthropological concern and
theorising, and to provide a strong and distinctly ethnographic voice to
the rising chorus of interdisciplinary interest in attention.
ADAK, or the Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords is a theory
initiative from AES/American Ethnological Society, HAU and L’Homme, a joint
intellectual endeavour of these learned societies and journals from three
distinguished anthropological traditions. The first debate was held at the
2016 AAA meetings in Minneapolis with the keyword FAKE, with the
participation of Veena Das (JHU), Alexei Yurchak (UC Berkeley), Gabriella
Coleman (McGill), Carlo Severi (EHESS), Graham Jones (MIT), John L.
Jackson Jr. (UPenn), and the second at the 2017 AAA meeting in Washington
DC, around HUMANISM, with Saba Mahmood (UC Berkeley), Didier Fassin
(Princeton), Joel Robbins (Cambridge), Lucy Suchman (Lancaster), Hugh
Gusterson (George Washington U), Danilyn Rutherford (UC Santa Cruz).
Facebook (
https://www.facebook.com/pages/HAU-Journal-of-Ethnographic-Theory/156351187763663
)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/@haujournal)
Website (http://www.haujournal.org)
============================================================
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