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SCA
Biannual Meeting
"Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics"
May 9-11, 2008
aboard the Queen Mary
Long Beach, CA
Conference
Program
Conference
Statement
Recent
work in the human sciences has made questions of ethics
and aesthetics central to the analysis of
politics once again.
Part of the impetus for this work comes from dissatisfaction
with older paradigms that have often treated ethics
and aesthetics as an ideological byproduct of the workings
of capital and
power politics. Recent developments within domains
as
disparate as the media, the bio-sciences, religion,
and finance have
forced the human sciences to rethink this older logic
of cause and effect, content and form. Scholarly explorations
have increasingly
focused on how ethical concerns have at times helped
spawn
new forms of governance (such as truth and reconciliation
commissions, novel auditory practices, social networks)
and at other moments
been the basis of imagining new forms of intimacy,
publicity, secrecy, and relationality. Similarly, emergent
aesthetic
forms have given rise to unique communication regimes,
sensory experiences,
and politics of deliberation, critique, and persuasion.
It is not surprising that anthropologists are at
the center
of such explorations given our discipline’s focus
on existing and emergent forms of human action.
The 2008 SCA annual meeting focused on recent work
produced around the thematics of ethics, aesthetics,
and politics.
Some of the questions and issues explored
are: What are
the forms of critique implicit within contemporary
ethical and aesthetic formations? How do these emergent
practices
reconfigure the classical schism between form and content
so germane to
the human sciences? How does the concept of “the
political” needs
to be rethought in light of the ethicization and aestheticization
of contemporary politics? What, if anything, is left
of culture in this debate? How do we rethink the notion
of “practice” in
this moment beyond the dual axis of structure and effect?
How might reflection on contemporary stagings of deliberation
and
debate help us rethink the relationship between affect
and reason?
Featured
plenary speakers included: Charles Hirschkind,
Hiro Miyazaki, Christopher Pinney, Hugh Raffles, Patricia
Spyer, and Alexei
Yurchak. The David Schneider Memorial Lecture
was given by Talal Asad, with discussant
comments by Liisa Malkki and David
Scott.
For
more information, please contact organizers Bill
Maurer (UC Irvine) and Saba
Mahmood (UC Berkeley).
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