Opening plenary
Sunday July 3rd, 4.30pm - 7pm
James Leach
Welcome and introduction. Why Description and Creativity?
Bio:
James Leach is Research Fellow and Director of Studies in
Anthropology, King’s College Cambridge and an Associate Lecturer in the
Dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Field research: Madang
Province, Papua New Guinea 1994-5, 1999, 2000-2001. Published works on
kinship and place, creativity, artistic production, ownership and
cultural/intellectual property. (Creative Land. Place and Procreation
on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. 2003 Berghahn Books,
Rationales of Ownership. Transactions and Claims to Ownership in
Contemporary Papua New Guinea, (ed with Lawrence Kalinoe), 2004
Sean Kingston Publishing.)
Field Research U.K.: 2002 to present, as an 'Attached Observer' with
participants in Art-Science collaborations. 'Attached Observer' refers to
a dual role: both facilitator for a network among collaborators, and a
commentator on the social and conceptual relationships influencing the
collaborations. The former role is fed by understandings gained through
the latter. James is also directing research on constructions of gender
among Open Source software programmers. Publications focussing on
knowledge production, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, multiple
authorship and models of ownership (Social Analysis, Cambridge
Anthropology).
Awarded the Royal
Anthropological Institute JB Donne Prize in the Anthropology of Art for
1999, and The Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004.
See
www.jamesleach.net
Bronwyn Parry
Enframing the body: the role of description, collaboration and
performativity in the creation of new anatomical portrayals.
Abstract:
Able, potentially, to be characterised simultaneously as descriptions,
representations, performances and technologies, this paper focuses on the
genesis and fate of two newly created pedagogical tools. The first, a new
form of interactive anatomical scan, the second, a library of live feed
DVDs of paediatric cardiac operations have recently been created at Great
Ormond Street Hospital for use by surgeons in domestic and virtual
environments. In here exploring the status of these new entities I pose a
series of enframing ontological questions: Are descriptions always textual
or linguistic – or can they be communicated visually? Can descriptions
ever arrive in the world free of interpretation? How can describing or
re-presenting a lived bodily experience in a new technological or
performative mode make knowledge of that experience available for wider
use? How are conceptions of value transformed through this process of
transmogrification?
Bio:
Bronwyn Parry is an economic and cultural geographer whose primary
interests lie in investigating the way human-environment relations are
being recast by technological, economic and regulatory changes. Her
special interests include the rise and operation of the life sciences
industry, informationalism, the commodification of life forms, bio-ethics,
and the emergence of intellectual property rights, indigenous rights and
other regulatory knowledge systems. She has just completed a three year
Wellcome Trust funded project on the creation and use of human tissue
collections in the UK and is the author of “Trading the Genome:
Investigating the commodification of bio-information” recently published
by Columbia University Press.
Tea break (5.30-5.45pm)
Debbora Battaglia
Ethnography between the lines
Abstract:
This paper considers the problem of “writing culture” coherently, when the
coherence of self and society has a negative value for subjects. The case
in point is the Raelian Religion, which finds its culturally natural
environment in the gaps between social orders, and within a network-fused
modernity. Raelians’ ventures to connect to mainstream culture, and to one
another, find expression in diverse forms of social practice, including
political protests, occult artwork, and hetero-science projects. Often,
however, these send conflicting messages about the Raelian understandings
as a system of beliefs. I argue that social movements such as the Raelians’,
who know themselves only as an emergent, anti-programmatic response to
official culture, turn gaps in social power to creative purpose by
claiming a value for hypothesis-making and other forms of creative action
in “outerspaces” that expose the practical limits of “the powers that be”.
Bio:
Debbora Battaglia is Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke
College, in Massachusetts. Professor Battaglia, who received
her doctorate from Cambridge University in the field of Social
Anthropology in 1981, specializes in issues of person and self,
faith-based science, culture and power, and expressive culture.
Professor Battaglia is the author
of On The Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl
Island Society (University of Chicago Press) and the editor of
Rhetorics of Self-Making (University of California Press) and ET
Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces (Duke University Press). Her
current project is a collection of essays from the field, Visits: An
Anthropological Discourse. Recent scholarly articles
include “Multiplicities: An Anthropologist’s Thoughts on Replicants and
Clones in Popular Films,” in the journal Critical Inquiry, and
“Toward an Ethics of the Open Subject: Writing Culture ‘In Good
Conscience’,” in Henrietta Moore, ed. Anthropological Theory Today
(Cambridge: Polity Press). She is the recipient of fellowships from the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Humanities, and has delivered keynote addresses to the European Molecular
Biology Organization in Heidelberg, the Association for Social
Anthropology Decennial meeting on Science and Society in Manchester, and
the Cornell - St. Andrews University Knowledge Exchange Conference at
Cornell University, on issues of faith-based human cloning. One needs to
approach her recent work with Raelian Religion in the spirit of serious
play.
Peter de Bolla
The inner life of aesthetic forms
Abstract:
We lack anything like a sophisticated discourse for talking about –
describing – the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Historically this
can be explained in a number of ways. Firstly, some question whether
anything intelligibly called the ‘aesthetic realm’ exists at all. Others
question the distinctness of experiences which might be termed
‘aesthetic’. Secondly, the tasks of phenomenology have been variously
welcomed or refused – some questioning the ‘subjective’ basis for
philosophical enquiry, others proposing ways in which subjective
knowledges attenuate or even enhance ‘rational’ epistemic models.
This paper will not dwell for long on the failings of this skeptical
and at times antagonistic historical tradition since it sets out to
proceed from an example of aesthetic experience. This will provide me with
an opportunity to investigate some beginning moves in a descriptive
architecture for aesthetic forms and, at the same time, present something
of the inner life of a particular artwork.
Bio:
Peter de Bolla is Reader in Cultural History and Aesthetics in the
Faculty of English, Cambridge University. The author of a number of books
including Art Matters (Harvard, 2001), The Education of the Eye
(Stanford, 2003), and The Discourse of the Sublime (Blackwell,
1989). HIs most recent publication, on the implications of the blush in
relation to our insertion into the pictorial field, is De anatomie van
de schoonheid. Van de neus van Hogarth tot de blos van Burgess.
Simon Goldhill
Using descriptions and valuing knowledge of the Classical world
Abstract:
This paper will look first at the development of the discourse of
description in the Greek texts of the Roman Empire and secondly at an
extraordinary archive of a large collection of poems all claiming to
describe the same statue. This is a major period for the practice and
theory of description, which has a fundamental impact on the long western
philsophical and poetical tradition. I will be concerned with the ancient
interest in the psychology of description and specifically with how
description can become a dazzling blind to clear understanding ? a
rehtorical deception as much as a rhetorical tool - , and secondly with
how the theory and practice of description is concerned with the
construction of the viewing subject. With what eyes and words is
description constructed? Bio:
Professor Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at Cambridge University and
Director of the Research Centre at King's which is hosting this event. He
has published widely on all aspects of Greek Literature and Culture. His
books include 'Reading Greek Tragedy', 'The Poet's Voice', 'Foucualt's
Virginity', 'Who Needs Greek?' and most recently 'Love, Sex and Tragedy',
and 'The Temple of Jerusalem'. |
