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1999-2000 Ethnohistory Workshop SeriesView our SpeakersCollectivities as Agents and Re-agents of DiscourseProspectusIn 1999-2000, the workshop will examine the problematic of agency in the context of theoretical work on discourse. To phrase this issue in a set of questions, one might begin by asking: How can we think about the relations between the ‘producers’ of discourse in a particular social context and those who find themselves cast as objects of discourses produced by others? Can we understand the ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of social collectivities by attending to the roles in which groups are linked to discursive practices, e.g., as producers, as audiences, as objects of description? We understand ‘modernism’ by reference to its focus on authenticity and originality, and ‘post-modernism’ by a reactive emphasis on repetition and derivativeness. If modernism ignores the role of discourse in shaping social representations, the post-modernist emphasis on discursive construction has tended to employ a socially unlocatable model of discourse. This presents certain difficulties: --How is a discourse socially anchored to a population of speakers? A second set of issues concerns the fact that social theorists are not the only ones who have conscious awareness of discursive processes in society. Members of society are themselves able to grasp, comprehend-and respond strategically to-discursive processes which affect them, even though such awareness is inevitably positional, and linked to group ideologies and interests. Yet group ideologies and interests are themselves products of locatable discursive processes. This brings us to the following set of questions: --To what extent are group interests created by, or made manifest through, allegiance to shared discourses? Who influences
what is shared? Discourse theory has helped reformulate our understanding of the social ‘self,’ an achievement largely due to the work of Michel Foucault. His readers are forcibly made aware of the illusory character of any theory of selfhood that relies on a model of the self as authentic, centered, and demarcated by clear boundaries. The Foucauldian claim is that such views about the self are themselves cultural constructs mediated by discursive processes. Yet Foucault does not address a second model of selfhood central to the Modernist project, that of the self as the seat of agency. This brings us to a third set of issues regarding discursive agents and their actions: --How do discourses about social groups empower or disempower them as actors? Speakers, 1999-2000Fall 1999 September 23, 1999: Rebecca Karl, Department of East Asian Studies and History, New York University October 21, 1999: Warren Breckman, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania November 16, 1999: Asif Agha, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania December 9, 1999: Nadia Abu el-Haj, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago Spring 2000 February 3, 2000: Jane Hill, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona March 2, 2000: Veena Das, New School University/University of Delhi April 13, 2000: Natalia Majluf, Museo de Arte de Lima May 4, 2000: Steve Caton, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University |