Haunted by specters – watch guest lecturer Stefan Herbrechter from Coventry University explaining why he distrusts matter

Dear participants of the Winter School 2012

The memory of our lively conversations is as fresh as the snow that (finally) covers the Swiss landscape now. I would like to thank you once more for your manifold contributions to the success and friendly atmosphere of the first of a series of at least four of such international events for doctoral and postdoctoral students. It was marked by intellectual curiosity, polite dialogue and mutual learning as well as cheerful evenings of music and play.

In the following, I would like to post the overall concept of the Bernese Winter School that I introduced in my welcome speech on Sunday evening. Read more

Due to the impacts of postmodernism, social and cultural anthropology has been dealing intensively with the possibilities and limits of representing “other” human beings and their meaningful worlds. So far, the discipline has discussed ways of improving its methods of representation without, however, fully raising questions about the quality and validity of the objects represented and the very idea, that they could be “represented”. Thus, despite attempts to purify classical anthropological categories, substantialized identities (“Humans”, “Others”, “Pygmies” etc.) along with various forms of binary oppositions (us – them, culture – nature, human – animal, fact – representation) have been rehearsed. The project aims to dissect and challenge the metaphysical outputs of the “anthropological machine” (Giorgio Agamben).

Read more