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ASA14 Decennial: Anthropology and
Enlightenment
19-22 June 2014, The Surgeons' Hall, Nicolson Street, Edinburgh
Theme
The conference theme, Anthropology and Enlightenment, takes its inspiration from the tradition of the Scottish
Enlightcnment. This was a time of intellectual optimism and experimentation, of polymaths and autodidacts
who were not afraid to address the widest and most fundamental questions of what it is to be human. Above
all, the Scottish Enlightenment was a milieu rather than a school, a world of public argument, rather than a
canonical set of texts. Through our choice of theme we aim to rekindle the spirit that gave birth to the
discipline of anthropology, yet in a manner and an idiom appropriate to the contemporary era, by combining
historical reflection with an exploration of anthropology's relations with other disciplines, including philosophy,
political economy, theology, history, architecture, medicine, law, agriculture and even sociology. Papers and
panels will form the basis of the programme and will address current interdisciplinary strands, each of which
could potentially be aligned with, and identified by, a key work from the Scottish Enlightenment:
Time, Earth and Cosmos
Health and Wealth
Natural Religion
Human / Nature
Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design
Moral Sentiments
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In addition there will be a series of other events, including special named lectures, fiinge sessions, tours and
much more.
The six strands have been developed as follows:
1. Time, Earth and the Cosmos
In 1788, the geologist James Hutton published A Theory of the Earth, a work that became one of the
enduring classics of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hutton’s radical thesis was that the Earth’s form had not
remained unchanged since the seven days of Creation, but was in a constant process of change. His
conclusion that "The result of our present enquiry is that we find no vestige ofa beginning.—no prospect of an
end" foreshadowed some of the shockwaves caused by Darwin's On the Origin of Species decades later.
Through this strand we will explore across a variety of disciplinary perspectives such moments of
enlightenment, moments of wonder, moments when the fabric of our understandings of our place within the
world become unravelled, undone and remade.
2. Do wealthy nations make for healthy publics?
Conscious of enlightenment legacies, this strand of the conference theme explores the relationship between
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‘wealth and health. A key idea of concem of enlightenment thought was that wealth leads to health: As Adam
‘Smith opined “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members
are poor and miserable”. How do the traces of these ideas play out in the arena of how we relate to and
understand health today?
3.Natural Religion
This panel refers to the 18th century debates in Scottish and English theological and philosophical circles
whether an empirical study of the natural world provides evidence for the objective existence of the Christian
God, and the arguments over the extension of demonstrative reasoning beyond pure mathematics to the areas
of morals and metaphysis. It will interrogate the rationality of our own discipline with regards to what we call
religion, the extent to which anthropologists, based in secular, intellectual and institutional locations, engage
with findamentally different conceptual spaces. Moreover, it will put anthropologists in dialogue with
theologians.
4, Human Nature
One of the intellectual mainstays of the European Enlightenment was the programmatic separation of humanity
from the ‘state of nature’, whether understood physically, politically or morally. Anthropologists have
followed the example of many of the peoples among whom they have worked in rejecting any a priori division
between nature and humanity in favour of an understanding of forms of life as emergent within fields of
mutually conditioning relations, by no means confined to the human. On the other hand, they have continued
to assert the ontological autonomy of the social and cultural domain from its biological ‘base’, and with it, the
distinctiveness of sociocultural anthropology vis-i-vis the science of human nature. How should
anthropologists think about community and polity, or indeed about the very explanatory domain of the
‘social’ sciences themselves? Is the ‘anthropos’ that gives the discipline its name destined to become an
anachronism in a fally relational approach to the more-than-human world?
5. Beauty, Order, Harmony and Design
Inthis strand, we seek to address the apparent discontinuity between beauty as something recognisable and
encompassing, which all humans may know and strive for, and its treatment as something relative, relegated
to the realm of personal taste or aesthetics, neither generalizable nor to be taken seriously. This panel
provokes us to consider that beauty is still something that people sense, seek and strive for, whether through
a walk in the country to a ‘place of outstanding natural beauty’, through acts of human creativity and
production, listening to music, experiencing architecture, visiting heritage sites or ancient buildings (age, it
seems, brings beauty) or to an art gallery or exhibition. Thus we consider beauty as forms of action and
process rather than as necessarily the results of actions.
6. Moral Sentiments
Inhis Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith deployed Hume's ‘experimental method’ (the appeal to
human experience) but sought to refine his thesis of impartial feeling. ‘Sympathy’ was the core of moral
sentiments: the feeling-with-the-passions-of others, arising from an innate desire to identify with others’
emotions. Sympathy operated through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructed
the experience of the person being watched, ‘There is much here with which anthropology can interest itself
‘Smith’s emphasis on mirroring calls to mind the more recent theorisations of Rene Girard, the emphasis on an
innate identification with the human other recalls Emmanuel Levinas’s theorisations of ‘face’, and the
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emphasis on imagining concurs with Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the imaginative as that which effects a
transcending of current life-worlds. A second aim of this panel is to ask what contemporary ethnography, and
what contemporary anthropological theory, can deliver conceming the roots of a moral sensibility. How does
recognition of fellow human beings and extending ‘sympathy’ towards them and the institutionalising of
humane norms of social interaction actually take place? What are the origins of moral human behaviour and
how can these be given a universal authority?
Proceed to the Call for Papers
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