Friday 24th May 2024, at 5pm CET
Program:
17:00 Welcome by HOAN convenors, Fabiana Dimpflmeier and Hande Birkalan Gedik
17:05 Keynote speaker: John Tresch (Warburg Institute; University of London)
“From Cosmologies to Cosmograms: Updating a Concept from the History of Anthropology”
17:25 Open forum for questions and comments
17:30 HOAN Correspondents presentation: Michael Edwards (Australia)
17:35 Dorothy L. Zinn (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano): presentation of Ernesto De Martino The End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence, University of Chicago Press, 2023.
17:45 Han Vermeulen (Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), Beatrice Di Brizio (MODI – University of Bologna): presentation of the research project Early Ethnographers in the Long Nineteenth Century (2024-2026)
17:55 Open forum for questions and comments
18:00 Closing and farewell words by HOAN convenors
“From Cosmologies to Cosmograms: Updating a Concept from the History of Anthropology”
Abstract
In the late nineteenth century the term “cosmology” was increasingly used in the plural, much like “worldviews” and “cultures.” Recently there has been a revival of interest in “cosmologies”—as witnessed in the collection Framing Cosmologies (ed. Ambramson and Holbraad, 2014) and in discussions of ontological pluralism and Amazonian perspectivism (see Descola, Viveiros de Castro). This talk considers key aspects of the history of the anthropological study of “cosmologies.” It also introduces the study of “cosmograms”– objects which represent or express the universe. Studying cosmograms is an empirically sound approach to “cosmologies” and “cultures,” and contributes to the longstanding project in both anthropology and history of science of comparing cosmologies.
