9e colloque étudiant international d'Artefact

3, 4, 5 février à l'Université Laval. Le programme est maintenant en ligne.

Prickly Paradigm

Après avoir reçu le dernier livre de Marshall Sahlins (The Western Illusion of Human Nature) dans une récente commande d'amazon, j'aimerais attirer l'attention sur sa propre maison d'édition, Prickly Paradigm, qui, depuis 2002, a publié une série de courts pamphlets intéressants, dont quelques uns sont disponibles intégralement en format pdf. Du catalogue, j'ai lu Waiting for Foucault, Still de Sahlins et On the Edges of Anthropology de James Clifford qui m'ont chacun laissé une forte impression. Je mentionnerais également la présence d'autres titres importants, comme l'essai controversé de Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (traduit en français aux éditions Allia), Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology de David Graeber, The Companion Species Manifesto de Donna Haraway et War of the Worlds: What About Peace? de Bruno Latour.

De la matière

Dans la dernière livraison des articles à paraître dans l'excellente revue Environment and Planning A (voir lien à droite), soulignons celui de Ben Anderson et John Wylie, "On Geography and Materiality" qui insiste sur le pluralisme de la matérialité pour réagir aux différents appels pour une rematérialisation de la géographie qui dérivent trop souvent, selon les auteurs d'une conception réductrice de la matérialité. Je vais citer un extrait de la conclusion pour clarifier la chose :

"it is apparent from the very word `rematerialise' that notions of a return, a turning away, and a recoiling from a scarily immaterial cultural spectre, a shade too clever by half, are at work here. Once upon a time, the phrase rematerialise suggests, human geography had its feet more firmly on the ground. It is important to note, then, that in one sense matter and materiality are not really at issue here, that these terms remain untheorised, or invoke but a rhetoric of physicality (Kearnes, 2003). Ironically, therefore, matter and materiality are in fact being used to represent or signify something else 'raw' corporeality, for instance, or a vogue for notions of performance and embodiment, or an object fetishism, or in extremis, a belief that social rather than cultural geography should be paramount, and that human geography must be an empirical social science. (...) materiality is never apprehensible in just one state, nor is it static or inert. Materiality is not glue, binding and holding other, less material, things (social relations, cultural meanings) together. Informing this paper is a more complex and positive decree that materiality is always already scored across states (solid, liquid, gaseous) and elements (air, fire, water, earth). As such, as variously turbulent, interrogative, and excessive, materiality is perpetually beyond itself."

Je renverrais également au débat sur la matérialité dans Archeological Dialogues (2007, vol. 14, no. 1) entre Tim Ingold, Daniel Miller, Christopher Tilley, Carl Knappett, Björn Nilsson.

Who thinks abstractly?

Hegel's short text, available in English here and in French here provides a great refutation of many anti-intellectualist banalities. Indeed, the evocation of "real things" happening to "real people" is often way more "abstract" than any patient conceptual elaboration. Thinking about concrete things does not necessarily lead to concrete thought.

"One who knows men traces the development of the criminal's mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! After all I remember how in my youth I heard a mayor lament that writers of books were going too far and sought to extirpate Christianity and righteousness altogether; somebody had written a defense of suicide; terrible, really too terrible! — Further questions revealed that The Sufferings of Werther were meant.

This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality."

De retour à mon autre maison

Rethinking Human Zoos : conference program

Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies

In association with ACHAC, Liverpool University Press
and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni

Rethinking Human Zoos
Friday 28/Saturday 29 November 2008

Institut Français du Royaume-Uni
17 Queensberry Place
LONDON SW7 2DT

A conference organized to coincide with the publication by Liverpool University Press of Human Zoos: Between Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, an English-language edition of Zoos humains

PROGRAMME

Friday (28 November)

1.00pm
SFPS AGM

Introduction and film projection

3.00pm
Introductory remarks, Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool) - Human Zoos. Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires

3.15 pm
Lecture, Sandrine Lemaire et Gilles Boetsch (ACHAC) - 'The Human Zoos project: l'émergence d'un débat'

Gilles Boestch will speak in French, Sandrine Lemaire in English

4.00pm
Éric Deroo (ACHAC), Presentation of the film Zoos Humains

4.30pm
Projection, Zoos Humains (52 mn, d'Éric Deroo et Pascal Blanchard)

5.30pm
Lecture, Nicolas Bancel et Pascal Blanchard (ACHAC) - Impact, spécificité et temporalité des Zoos humains

6.00pm
Débat, réactions et questions autour de l'objet de recherche "Human Zoos" (with the six editors of the collection published by Liverpool University Press)

6.30pm Book launch

Saturday (29 november)

9.30am Session 1 (Historicizing the Human Zoo):
Garry Sandison (University College Cork), Le Mètre du maître: empire, anthropométrie et l'incommensurable
Hilke Thode-Arora, Abraham's Diary (1880/81) - a Hagenbeck Ethnic Show from an Inuk Participant's Viewpoint
Sadiah Qureshi (University of Cambridge), Converting "Unfruitful Wonder": R. G. Latham, Displayed Peoples and the Natural History of Race, 1843-1863'

11.00 am Coffee and poster session
Presentation of poster: Louise Hardwick (University of Oxford), 'Human Zoos: Exotic and Erotic?'

11.45am Plenary lecture
Herman Lebovics (SUNY Stony Brook), Etrangères, Indigènes et les Crocodiles: Odd Neighbors at the Palais de la Porte Dorée

1.00pm Lunch (own arrangements)

2.00pm Session 2 (Viewing the Human Zoo):
Van Troi Tran, An Empire for the Hungry Masses: the Crowd Eats and Meets the Indigènes at the 1889 World's Fair
Jonathan Hensher (University of Manchester), "Pour les enfants et pour toute la famille": Race and Spectatorship in Pre-War French Popular Visual Culture

3.00pm Coffee

3.30pm Session 3 (Legacies of the Human Zoo):
Annette Bickford, "Nice for Daddy": Racialized Theatres of Sexual Alterity
Scott Taylor, The Post-Colonial Anti-Zoo in the United States

4.30pm Concluding remarks
Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool), Situating Human Zoos

5.00pm End of conference

October 2008 issue of History and Theory

Hello from History and Theory:
The October 2008 issue of History and Theory contains four really interesting articles and eight review essays. Consider Susan Crane's "Choosing Not to Look: Representation, Repatriation, and Holocaust Atrocity Photography": Crane asks, "have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?" and she answers-against conventional wisdom and practice-that not only have they done so, but that as a result they should be removed from public view or be what she calls "repatriated." The essay is so cogently argued and gracefully written that it will at least stimulate ideas that you may well not have thought of before, or it may actually convince you and lead you to act quite differently. In either case, it is very much worth reading (indeed, we've chosen it to be available at no cost for all those receiving this email. To download a free copy of it, click here: http://www.historyandtheory.org/freearticle.html)

But Crane's is not the only revelatory article in this issue. Anita Kasabova, in "Memory, Memorials, and Commemoration," presents what she calls a semantic account of the relation between the past and the present, and in the process shows the ways memory, memorials, and commemorations function in light of this relation. In this she offers an account at odds with the presentism of Eelco Runia and others who have presented their views on these subjects in our pages. The article is remarkably rich in the way it brings so many topics into focus and shows how they relate to one another.

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen's "Making Sense of Conceptual Change" addresses a fundamental question in intellectual history: what is it about? Some historians, such as Arthur Lovejoy of the great chain of being fame, have claimed that intellectual history is about unit-ideas, but critics have countered that there are no such units that cut across historical epochs; they propose, instead, that it is linguistic entities that are the object of study, or they wonder whether the whole notion of intellectual history isn't a non-starter because there is nothing stable enough to count as the object of such a history. To these critics Kuukkanen responds that we should accept ideas and concepts as the basis for an intelligible history of thought-so his is a return in a way to Lovejoy-but that we have to be more sophisticated than Lovejoy about what this means. He proposes that concepts and ideas are comprised of a core and a margin, and that conceiving of them in this way solves a number of !
problems that Lovejoy's original formulation could not.

I bet most of you don't know what "Froude's disease" is. I didn't before I read Ian Hesketh's "Diagnosing Froude's Disease: Boundary Work and the Discipline of History in Late-Victorian Britain." Froude was one of the most popular historians in late nineteenth-century Britain, but he denied that history was a science, and claimed that it has more to do with art and drama. Needless to say, professional historians at the time didn't like this approach; indeed, E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they "cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow-worker in the cause of historic truth," and diagnosed him as suffering from "an inborn and incurable twist" that resulted in "Froude's disease"-the inability to "make an accurate statement about any matter." Hesketh unpacks the construction of "Froude's disease," and exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non-scientific mod!
es of thought such as that offered by Froude. The result is not just an elegant revisiting of an earlier time, but a clarifying reminder of the ways disciplinary boundaries are established and enforced.

Click here to read abstracts of the four articles I have just discussed:
http://www.historyandtheory.org/archives/oct08.html

The issue also includes these review essays:

Christopher Lloyd on William H. Sewell Jr., The Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation

Michael S. Roth on Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4

Jürgen Kocka on Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

Richard H. King on Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century

William H. Krieger on Peter Kosso, Knowing the Past: Philosophical Issues of History and Archaeology

José Carlos Bermejo-Barrera on Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation

Lionel Gossman on Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe

Abdelmajid Hannoum on François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps

One would have to go some distance to find a list of more distinguished and insightful authors and reviewers than this!

You can, of course, read these reviews by going to our website and clicking on the appropriate links. Note that we are now including links from book review listings in the table of contents on our web pages directly to Amazon.com so that you can easily search inside the book under review and buy it if you wish.

To subscribe to the journal (which you can do entirely over the web with your credit card via Blackwell's secure server), click here:
http://www.historyandtheory.org/subscribe.html
(As a subscriber you also get access to the electronic version of the journal).

I hope you find this issue as thought-provoking as I do. I welcome any comments you have about it or other topics that are germane to the journal. You can contact me at: bfay@wesleyan.edu

Brian Fay
Executive Editor

Sahlins on Iraq and Thucydides

Excerpt from "Interview with Marshall Sahlins", Anthropological Theory, Vol. 8, no. 3 (2008), p. 328-329.

Q What can the Peloponesian wars tell us about the contemporary war in Iraq?

A By substituting logos for Herodotus’ mythos, Thucydides usurped the title of ‘father of history’ and became the darling of International Relations Realists and other western devotees of Realpolitik. And no doubt Thucydides’ reputation will remain untarnished among the theorists of national self-interest despite that Bush’s Iraq war may be the most irrational political blunder since the Athenian invasion of Sicily. But the most revealing parallel to Iraq was the anarchic civil strife (stasis) at Corcyra, where the Spartans and the Athenians became engaged in an internal struggle between the local oligarchs and the demos for control of the city. Indeed the conflict was fateful for western political philosophy, inasmuch as Thomas Hobbes, who was first to translate Thucydides directly into English, found in the ancient historian’s description of the breakdown of order at Corcyra the model of his own ‘state of nature’.

At Corcyra, as in Iraq, when the institutions of state lost all legitimacy and violence became the means of every partisan cause, sacred values of justice, morality, and religion were drenched in blood and set to naught. Plato once remarked that every polis is many poleis, because it consists of a city of the rich and a city of the poor, which are at war with one another, and each of these is again made up of contending parties. And when global causes and forces – such as Athenian domination at Corcyra or democratic and Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq – are compounded with local dissensions, the effect is a seeming dissolution of cultural order by the irruption of a brutal human nature. At Corcyra, Thucydides said, ‘even words had to change their ordinary meaning and take what was now given to them’. Cautious plotting became ‘self defense’; moderation, ‘unmanliness’; prudence, ‘cowardice’. Echoing certain sophists’ arguments about the superficiality of culture (nomos) relative to the irresistibility of nature (physis), the ancient historian claimed that such maelstroms of hypocrisy and iniquity will always break out when a natural lust for power and gain is unleashed on the flimsy conventions of social order. The same ideology was echoed again in Donald Rumsfeld’s comments on the disorder following the American occupation of Baghdad: ‘Stuff happens’, he concluded – a cleaned-up version of the proverbial ‘Shit happens’.

It is supposed to be a failing of other people, yet how easily westerners thus conflate culture with nature. Whether in Corcyra or Iraq, it took an enormous array of conflicting moral and political causes to produce this so-called state of nature. In this regard it is difficult to credit Thucydides’ contention that words lost their meanings at Corcyra so much that the hypocritical use of them made people all the angrier at the evident deceit. Living as Americans do under a regime that, in the oxymoronic name of ‘compassionate conservatism’, enriches the already super-wealthy at the expense of the society, one is entitled to doubt that the cynicism changes the meaning of ‘compassion’ so much as it exposes the mendacity of those who so abuse the word. It is not for nothing that George W. Bush is the most hated American president since – well, since Clinton. But then, to attribute the mayhem instigated by the abuse of words to a pre-verbal human disposition is to practice ad absurdum the same kind of verbal deception one is claiming to unmask. In Corcyra and Iraq both, the intervention of fateful larger causes gave new and unconditional values to the internal schisms of the city, rendering them as unconditional as they were abstract and ideological. The fight was now over such ultimate ends as ‘freedom’, ‘slavery’, ‘democracy’, ‘Islam’, ‘dictatorship’, 'terrorism', ‘imperialism’. Which only proves that it takes a lot of culture to make a state of nature.