Department of social anthropology seminar with Carlo Severi

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Carlo Severi from EHESS, Paris. He will present the following paper:


The Arts of Memory: Comparative perspectives on a mental artefact


Abstract
For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons – that form the opposite figure of writing – has deeply influenced western tradition. In this article, the author shows that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology. Rather than trying to know if Native American techniques of Memory are true scripts or mere mnemonics, we can explore the formal aspect both have in common, compare the mental processes they call for. We can ask if both systems belong to the same conceptual universe, to a mental language – to use Giambattista Vico phrase – that would characterise the Native American arts of Memory. In this perspective, techniques of Memory stop being hybrids or imprecise, and we will better understand their nature and functions as mental artefacts. [Keywords : Art, Memory, Pictographs, khipu, tradition, iconography]


Bionote
Carlo Severi is Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and directeur de recherche au CNRS. A member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale of the Collège de France since 1985, he has been a Getty Scholar at the Getty Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles (1994-95) and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2002-2003). This year, he has been elected to a Visiting Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge. Among his books: La memoria rituale (La Nuova Italia, Florence 1993) Naven ou le donner à voir (with M. Houseman, CNRS Éditions de la MSH, 1994 ; English Transl. Brill, 1998) and Le principe de la chimère, Ed. Rue d’Ulm-Musée du Quai Branly, 2007.


All interested are welcome!