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1994-1995 Ethnohistory Workshop SeriesView our SpeakersImages: Icons, Words, Imagination, Power, TruthProspectusWe propose to explore the subject of images through the social practices involved in fashioning and using them. While the number of possible approaches is almost infinite, we prefer to take a dynamic view of images as communicative events through which we actively shape and understand our world(s), rather than see them as signs that refer to an external reality. We think that practice may be a useful means to examine some basic notions about the power and meaning of images. We suggest that their power is closely related to their ambiguity, their 'deceptiveness,' in being both like and not like something else. The problems of likeness, or resemblance, versus prsence, of similarity, mimetic correspondence, and identity: these are all involved in the dangerous power that lies at the boundary between what is and is not, what is here and not here, what is tangible and intangible, between creature and creator. We are particularly interested in looking at how the visual and the verbal infiltrate into each other's domains: how they act on each other through such means as incantation, consecration, interpretation, or illustration, and work together to create knowledge and meaning. Another nexus to explore is that between material images and mental images, such as dreams, hallucinations, and visions. Such acts of imagining can themselves be interpreted as aspects of social practice. We assume that cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives will emerge in discussion, even if all the papers do not explicitly address such links. We expect to find not only that the codes temselves will differ across space and time, but also that visual and verbal codes will interact in different ways in different social settings. And we are especially interested in looking at the differing balance of tensions between image and word in the production of knowledge. How do the two combine or clash in the production of judicial verisimilitude, historical veracity, and other truth claims? How do conflicting emphases on image and word affect sacrality? In the realm of the sacred can the Word coexist with the icon and fetish? Speakers, 1994-1995Fall 1994 September 22, 1994: "Images: Icons, Words, Imagination, Power, Truth" October 20, 1994: William Pietz November 11, 1994: Michael Camille, Department of Art History, University of Chicago December 8, 1994: Webb Keane, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Spring 1995 February 2, 1995: Greg Urban, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania March 2, 1995: Jill Furst, Department of Art History, Moore College of Art March 30, 1995: Eamon Duffy, Magdalene College, Cambridge University April 27, 1995: Suzanne Blier, Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University |