Department of social anthropology seminar with Martin Holbraad
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The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Martin Holbraad from the Department of Anthropology at University College London. He will present the following paper:
"Can the thing speak? Anthropology and pragatology"
Abstract
A cogent take on the past decade’s effervescence in the study of ‘materiality’ in the social sciences draws an analogy with post-colonial studies, and particularly the politically responsive concern with subaltern subjectivities (Fowles 2008, 2010). If much scholarship in the 1980s and ‘90s was directed towards theorising the ‘agency’ of colonial and post-colonial subjects, then the 2000s have been partly about making a similar move with respect to ‘things’. In this paper I explore these 'emancipatory' moves in the recent literature on 'the rise of the thing', and argue that at most they manage to emancipate things by associating them with humans. Revisiting earlier arguments of my own in this vein (Henare et al 2007, Holbraad 2009), the latter half of the paper seeks to develop an analytical perspective that would allow things to be emancipated 'as such' - a manifesto for allowing things to speak to us in their own voice. Such an analytic, I argue, places the focus on things’ /conceptual affordances/: the difference that things’ material characteristics make to attempts to ‘think’ them.
Bionote
Martin Holbraad works in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. He has conducted fieldwork on Afro-Cuban religion in Havana since 1998. His research focuses on the relationship between myth and action, the consecration of objects, and, more broadly, the logic of cosmological thought in the field of religion as well as in politics. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago, in press - available in April 2012) and co-editor of Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge, 2007) and Technologies of the Imagination (Special Issue of Ethnos, 2009).
All interested are welcome!
Best regards
BSAS Comittee