the society of the living and the dead

 

dr. stuart mclean, university of minnesota

 

international visiting scholar's seminar autumn 2010/spring 2011

 

The concluding event in this series of seminars by International Visiting Fellow Dr. Stuart McLean will take place on Friday April 8th 16:00-18:00 in the lecture theatre at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Royal Kilmainham Hospital). The readings for this concluding session in the series will be:
Todd Ramo´ N Ochoa (2007) "Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography", CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 4, pp. 473–500.
Bracha L. Ettinger (2004) "Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event" Theory, Culture & Society February, vol. 21 no. 1 69-94

To get access to the readings and to reserve a place, please contact martin.mccabe(at)gradcam.ie

about the seminar series

 

What would it mean to conceive of the dead not simply in the guise of ghosts or revenants but as full members of a collective including both living humans and other kinds of entities? Much social theory has conceived of the advent of modernity in terms of an altered or attenuated relationship between the living and the dead – from Schiller’s and Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” to Baudrillard’s “extradition of the dead.” Anthropologists have often considered relations between the living and the dead in terms of specific transactions - offerings, exchanges etc. – aimed at obtaining benefits or warding off dangers or else have focused on cultural representations of the dead constructed by the living. Nonetheless, it is the living (and the modes of relatedness deemed specific to them) who have tended to remain the focus of inquiry. In the light, however, of recent questionings both of the concept of modernity and of the exclusively human character of social relationships, it is worth asking what a renewed attention to the dead and their interactions with the living might play in a more far-reaching re-theorization of collective life. It is striking that recent efforts to extend the study of social relationships to encompass other-than human actors have usually had little to say about the dead. Actor-network inspired approaches, for example, have often been disappointingly commonsensical in their multiplication of social actors - objects, technologies etc., but not, for example, ghosts, spirits or gods. How then is one to account for the absence of the dead from these discussions? Could it be that death confronts us with a combination of familiarity and alterity that is particularly resistant to such a project, such that the inclusion of the dead within an expanded vision of collective life would entail, not merely the stretching of already extant categories of social analysis (agency, power etc.) but a thoroughgoing re-imagining of the concept of sociality itself, along with its associated explanatory logics? These seminars ask whether it is possible to conceive of a ‘society of the living and the dead?’ What would such a society look like? What strategies of research and modes of presentation might be capable of delineating it? Might this, for example, require a more serious and sustained engagement between the humanities, sciences and social sciences and literature and the visual arts? What possibilities might such a vision afford for a thinking, writing and ethics of difference beyond the binarisms of subject and object, nature and culture, bios and zoë? Materials to be discussed include audio-visual media, ethnography, literature, philosophy and social theory.

 

 

 

For additional information on the collaborating institutions consult www.dit.ie, www.ncad.ie, www.iadt.ie and www.ulster.ac.uk.