Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies conference 2011
Venue: The Hebdomadar’s Room, St. Salvator’s Quad
Date: September 20-22 2011
Organisers: Mark Harris and Nigel Rapport
Recent interest in the concept of imagination in anthropology has opened up a series of new questions for the discipline. These include the role it plays in constructing ethnographic data—knowledge about the social world—both for the anthropologist and for his or her informants, and the connection between imagination and (other) forms of knowledge such as visual imagery.
This conference seeks to build on these developments and consider the imagination as a human faculty: both as an object of anthropological investigation, ethnographic and theoretic, and as a technique for approaching reality, of the anthropologist and the informant alike.
The focus on imagination is thus intended to refresh our appreciation of the human and rethink a humanistic approach in anthropology. In particular, we hope to refocus on individual human capacities and faculties rather than abstractions and fictions.
Key questions include:
- Can imagination be ethnographically investigated? Or is imagination a methodological a priori?
- What is the intellectual history of imagination?
- What role has imagination played in the development of anthropology?
- What are the differences between using the imagination in participant-observation, in the interview and in the archive? In the gathering of data and in its representation?
- What are the samenesses and differences between use of the imagination in an everyday setting and a scientific or disciplinary one–between imagination as anthropological methodology and as local ethnomethodology?
- What are the limits of imagination?
The conference will bring together anthropologists from within St. Andrews and without, and also hope to look beyond disciplinary boundaries to the humanities more broadly.