Department of social anthropology seminar with Birgit Meyer
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The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Birgit Meyer from Utrecht University. She will present the following paper:
How Pictures Matter. Videos, Spirits and the Popular Imagination in Ghana
Abstract
My presentation will be based on my longstanding work on the Ghanaian video film industry that emerged in the late 1980s as part and parcel of a democratized and privatized public culture. I read the movies produced and circulated by this industry as entry points into the popular imagination. My point of departure in the lecture (and the book in progress on which it is based) is that the imagination is not limited to the level of perception and signification (processes within the mind), but materializes through concrete cultural forms. Pictures partake in constructing a particular public environment and, in turn, shape individual perceptions, induce sensations and underpin notions of belonging. Taking seriously the material dimension of the imagination – the way in which it is expressed in cultural forms, especially pictures, shaping a habitat, and embodied in persons as a habitus - allows us to study its world-making capacity in a concrete sense. Using examples such as the representation of urban space and the occult in movies, it will be shown that pictures are a phenomenally productive entry point for understanding the formative role of the imagination in constituting worlds of everyday lived experience.
Bionote
Birgit Meyer (PhD Cultural Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, 1995) is professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. She conducted research on and published about colonial missions and local appropriations of Christianity, modernity and conversion, the rise of Pentecostalism in the context of neo-liberal capitalism, popular culture and video-films in Ghana, the relation between religion, media and identity, as well as on material religion and the place and role of religion in the 21st century.
All interested are welcome!