Public Lecture with Stephan Palmié : When is a thing? Transduction and Immediacy in Afro-Cuban Ritual. Or, ANT in Matanzas, Cuba, Summer of 1948.
Revisiting William R. Bascom’s 1948 ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semi-urban site in Cuba’s Province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline, this essay constitutes a thought experiment.
At the same time, I aim to offer a critique of current attempts to redefine our discipline’s mission under the sign of an “ontological turn” that recurs to notions of “radical alterity” that strike me as both essentialist, and certainly profoundly ahistorical. Recurring to Karen Barad’s theories of “agential realism,” I suggest that contemporary concerns with “posthumanist” “anti-representationalism” better be tempered by a view of our epistemic pursuits, including those of anthropology, as embedded in thoroughly historical – and so changing – ontologies.
In light of such considerations, the lecture concludes on a vision of anthropology as a form of knowledge that cannot afford to evade neither the historical transformations of the social worlds it aims to illuminate, nor that of the concurrent transformations in its own epistemic orientations, but has to reframe its goals in terms of conjunctures of ontologies and epistemologies of mutually relational and, most importantly, historical scope.
Stephan Palmié is Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He conducts ethnographic and historical research on Afro-Caribbean cultures, with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban religious formations and their relations to the history and cultures of a wider Atlantic world.
Mi, 17. Mai 2017, 18:00 Uhr
Universität Konstanz, Raum Y 311
(http://anthropology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty_member/stephan_palmie/)