CfP: Materiality and Embodiment in Greater Asia
Call for Papers
South-South II: Materiality and Embodiment in Greater Asia and Africa
October 27-28, 2017
Columbia University, New York
The
incorporation of non-humans as active participants in knowledge
production has prepared the way for interrogations of the nature of
“objects”, “bodies”, and their relationship to one another throughout
history. Transregional studies of objects and bodies have often focused
on narratives of circulation and migration. But how does an inclusion of
an object or body’s embeddedness in certain geographies and
temporal contexts enable new possibilities for research? Does a study of
material culture, theorized through conceptions of objects and bodies,
confound or confirm regional geographies? This conference seeks to give
voice to histories of materiality and embodiment in the Global South, in
particular in Africa and Greater Asia broadly defined.
This
conference thus poses two primary questions. First, how can African and
Asian concepts and archives be used to reframe discourses on
materiality and embodiment in the Global South? Second, what new optics
of research do historical and historiographical questions about
materiality and embodiment within the geographies of Greater Asia and
Africa enable? Between these framing questions, many more emerge: how
does the study of material culture intersect with processes of both
circulation and embeddedness? How do materials themselves
structure political economies? What are the ways, if any, of recovering
histories of materials without the histories of humans? What purposes do
materials serve in therapeutics, and how do they shape wellbeing -
whether biomedical, physiological, psychological, political, religious,
or otherwise? Where does the line between human and material blur, and
in what ways can materiality be understood as an extension of embodiment
or personhood?
The
conference aims to facilitate historical and theoretical discussions
around these questions. Themes of interest include but are not limited
to:
- “Materiality” and “embodiment” as categories of research
- Object and body histories: biographies, agencies, genealogies, and ontologies
- Objects and bodies and the transmission of skills or experience
- Humans as objects/materials and vice-versa
- Objects in and as archives
- Economic and legal histories of commoditization and object-regulation
- Refuse and garbage
- Rituals, politics, and economies of artifacts, comestibles, etc.
- Medical, chemical, biological, botanical, and textual objects and bodies
This
two-day conference will take place on October 27th and 28th at Columbia
University in New York. We invite graduate students, recent graduates,
non-tenure-track faculty across disciplines such as Anthropology, Art
History, History, History of Science, Philosophy, African, East Asian,
Middle Eastern, and South Asian Studies, Religion, and others to submit
abstracts (300 words or less) along with a CV by June 1, 2017 to southsouthconference@
Contact email: southsouthconference@
Look for updates on: http://cih.columbia.edu/
Click here for information about last year’s South-South conference, “Intellectual History across Middle East and South Asia, 1857-1948”.