Time Displacements, Similarity and Difference in a World of Movement and Migration:  Some Aspects of the Production of Culture and Theory of Culture

Anil Bhatti

Our argument is put forward in a world of general mobilisation under conditions characterised by borders, demarcations, border crossings, social and cultural transformations and transgressions. This is part of the process of globalisation, a term I use here with the nuances conveyed more closely by ‘mondialisation’ and ‘planetarisation’. In spite of an optimistic version of a world without borders, the unsettlement of the world of demarcations and borders has also created illusions about a post-national order. We are however living objectively in a very real world of power relations and structures of dominations which in turn create partially unstable structures of inclusion, exclusion, empowerment and disenfranchisement. These put their stamp on the complex processes of the production of culture, culture theory and of knowledge production in general.

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The Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia (Poland) is happy to announce a CFP for an upcoming international conference:

The Popular Life of Things. Material Culture(s) and Popular Processes to be held in Sosnowiec (Poland), 3-4 July 2014

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Anil Bhatti studied Germanistik, International Politics, and Philosophy at the LMU (University of Munich) and was awarded a doctorate in 1971. From 1983 to 2009 he was a professor at the Centre of German Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Since August 2009 he is Professor Emeritus of the University. He was a guest professor at the Universities of Kassel, Göttingen, Graz, Wien and Tübingen. He is the Honorary President of Goethe Society of India. Bhatti is recipient of the Jacob-und Wilhelm-Grimm-Preis of the DAAD (2001),  recipient of the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, (2005) and recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art (2011). Between 2010 and 2011 he was a Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg, University of Konstanz. November 2011 he received the Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In this context see Bhatti’s work on “Ähnlichkeiten” (Similarities).
Homepage: www.jnu.ac.in/Faculty/abhatti
E-Mail: anilbhatti(at)hotmail.com.
Selected publications

Regarding the topic of the Winter School 2014, his areas of expertise are Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Transfer (India-Germany), Polyglotism, Similarity/Diversity.

 Hans Peter Hahn is professor of cultural anthropology at Goethe-University, Frankfurt a.M. /Germany. He also studied and teached at the African Studies Centre at Bayreuth University. Between 2000 and 2007, Hahn was participating in a research project on “Global Influences on Local Agency in Africa”. Among the numerous publications that resulted from this project, the most important deal with the use and consumption of the mobile phone in Africa. His theoretical interest focusses on globalization and material culture. Both fields merge in his recent publications on water (“People at the well”, 2012) and urbanism (“Urban life worlds in motion”, 2013). The shared point of view of these edited volumes is an extended understanding of the mobility of things and ideas; on how they are changing the people’s ways of life, their expectations for the future and their perceived needs and desires. The question on how the mobility of things can transform societies as well as individuals is also the topic of his most recent publication (Mobility of Things, 2013).

Regarding the topic of the Winter School 2014, his areas of expertise are Transforming Objects, Itineraries of the Material, Urban Anthropology, Museology, Migration, Globalization, Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo) and beyond.

Helga Mitterbauer is Austrian visiting associate professor at the University of Alberta, Edmonton (since 2010); She concluded her PhD (2000) and Habilitation (2008) at the University of Graz where she has been teaching since 1993. She has been a visiting professor at the ELTE Budapest (2003), the University of Zagreb (2005-2006), and the University of Innsbruck (2013). She was a research-fellow at the IFK Vienna (2007/08) and founder and editor of the Yearbook in Cultural Studies „Moderne“ (since 2005). She has published about 20 volumes and numerous articles on Austrian and German literature and culture from 19^th to 21^st century, on the theory of cultural transfers, and on transcultural studies.
E-Mail: helga.mitterbauer(at)ualberta.ca
Selected Publications

Regarding the topic of the Winter School 2014, her areas of expertise are Transcultural Studies, Cultural Transfers, Postcolonial Theory and Cultural Transfer, Relations between Austrian and Central European Literature, Migration in Literature.

Marianne Sommer is professor for Kulturwissenschaften and SNSF-professor for the history of science and science studies at the University of Lucerne. Prior to her current position, she has been at the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, Stanford University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her research and publications have focused on the cultural history of the life, earth, and human sciences, with a particular interest in the human origins sciences. Her latest monograph represents a (pre)history of paleoanthropology and related disciplines from ca. 1800 to the present that is told along the lines of the biography of a particular human fossil skeleton (Bones and Ochre, Harvard University Press, 2007). With a small research team she currently works on the two Swiss National Science Foundation projects ‘History Within: The Phylogenetic Memory of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules’ and ‘Collecting Humanity: How Human Remains Are Made into Museum Objects’.

Regarding the topic of the Winter School 2014, her areas of expertise are Biographies of Objects, Museology, Human Population Genetics, Imagined Communities, Evolution.

Diffractions, the Lisbon graduate journal for the study of culture, announces the CfP for its second issue on

(Un-)Boundedness: On Mobility and Belonging

Deadline for submissions: November 15 2013

When: 9 – 15 February 2014
Where: Schloss Münchenwiler near Berne, Switzerland
Languages: English (main), German, French
ECTS: 6 | Costs: 500.- Swiss francs (travel and accommodation [double room] covered by organizer)

Application deadline: 5 October 2013

Official flyer

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In a literal sense, “cultural transfer” refers to the “cultural mobility of objects” (Stephen Greenblatt): the global flow of commodities, concepts, words, images, persons, animals, money, weapons, drugs etc. Such a pragmatic notion may be the starting point for an interdisciplinary debate on alternative theories of “culture” in the humanities and social sciences.  Yet, “cultural transfer” implies not only the flow of things but also the fluidity of those who are engaged in their exchange. Every attempt to map landscapes of cultural transfer has to bear in mind that these landscapes are highly unstable and that places and borders, however imaginary they may be, are constantly ‘on the move’. It has become increasingly difficult to identify origins and ends or even signposts and directions of cultural processes. Thus, culture itself may be read as transfer (Lutz Musner), as an ongoing negotiation. It is eternally be-coming rather than being. Demarcations of borders, however, are very real. Definitions of “cultures” prove highly effective and “imaginary communities” (Benedict Anderson) are potent political agents. This is why we cannot stop short at an ab-stract diagnosis of a rhizomatic game (Gilles Deleuze) of endless différance (Jacques Derrida). The analysis of cultural transfer and culture as transfer has to take into account the dramatic situations of contact zones, the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion as well as the conditions of selection, transla-tion, adaption or mutation within unequal power relations. Furthermore, the analysis of cultural mobility has to acknow-ledge that the anthropocentric notion of the human as prime mover of objects and creator of meaning might be undermined by the agency of nonhuman life, inorganic matter and the various idiosyncrasies of the objects themselves.

The Winter School addresses a twofold question:
• How can we reconstruct and conceptualize concrete examples of cultural transfer?
• And how can we, with such examples in mind, reconsider culture as transfer?

Invited guests and the focus of their lecture

Anil Bhatti
(German and Cultural Studies, University of New Delhi)
Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Transfer (India-Germany), Polyglotism, Similarity/Diversity

Hans Peter Hahn
(Social Anthropology/Ethnology, University of Frankfurt)
Transforming Objects, Itineraries of the Material, Urban Anthropology, Museology, Migration, Globalization, Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo) and beyond

Helga Mitterbauer
(German Literature/Cultural Studies, University of Alberta)
Transcultural Studies, Cultural Transfers, Postcolonial Theory and Cultural Transfer, Relations between Austrian and Central European Literature, Migration in Literature

Marianne Sommer
(History of Science/Cultural Studies, University of Lucerne)
Biographies of Objects, Museology, Human Population Genetics, Imagined Communities, Evolution

Hi all

Just to let you know that I am off to Finland in September for an interdisciplinary research workshop to ecology and deep time in the subArctic tundra organised by the Finnish Society of Bioart. Here is the project blog FYI: http://bioartsociety.fi/deep_time/ I will be checking out the rock art up there to see what is growing.

Hope you are all well.

Tarsh

Stefan Herbrechter’s book on posthumanism has just been published: more

The Slow Science Manifesto:

http://slow-science.org

ClarissaLee_poster_IASH_rev

This represents the final version of the poster first presented at Winter School 2013.