Power of Object

Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail Maison de la Recherche 5 allées A. Machado 31058 TOULOUSE CEDEX 9 Téléphone 05 61 50 24 30 Site web : http : www.univ-tlse2.fr/lisst

The Power of Objects:

Materiality - Forms - Ritual Action

International Conference, Toulouse:

May 30th – June 1st 2013

ORGANIZATION :

-Centre d’Anthropologie Sociale du Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Solidarité, Sociétés, Territoires (UMR 5193) -ERASME (Équipe de recherche sur la Réception de l'Antiquité : Sources, Mémoire, Enjeux) du laboratoire « Patrimoine, Littérature, Histoire » (UTM) -Institut Universitaire de France Scientific Committee: Jean-Pierre Albert (CAS-LISST), Corinne Bonnet (PLH-ERASME/IUF), Adeline Grand-Clément (PLH-ERASME), Agnès Kedzierska-Manzon (CAS-LISST)


PROGRAM

Thursday, May 30 th

14:00–14:30 pm Opening of the Conference : Vice-Dean of the Scientific Counsel of the University of Toulouse Le Mirail The welcome speech and presentation of the program: Agnès Kedzierska Manzon (CAS-LISST) 14:30–15:15 pm Inaugural lecture Michael Taussig (Columbia University, NYC, USA) Coffee break 15:30–18:30 pm PANEL # 1 Humans and Things: Bodies and Matter; discussion moderated by Marlène Albert-Llorca (UTM, CAS-LISST)

• Catherine J. Allen (GWU, Washington DC, USA) Stones Who Love Me: Dimensionality, Enclosure, and Petrification in Andean Culture • Marika Moisseeff (EHESS, LAS) Churinga and Bodies as Exemplary Ritual Objects • Agnès Kedzierska-Manzon (CAS-LISST) Life Matters: Or (Mande) Fetishes and Their Need for Blood

Friday, May 31 st 9:00 am–12: 00 pm PANEL # 2 Effectiveness 1: Esthetics and Politics of Modernit y; discussion moderated by :

• Jean-Paul Colleyn (EHESS, CEAf) The de facto Strength of Things • Michael Houseman (EPHE, CEMAF) Why Are the Material Aspects of New Age and Neo-Pagan Ceremonial so Kitsch and Contrived? • Sally Promey (Yale University, USA) Material Objects and Spiritual Sensations in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park

Lunch break

14:00–18:00 pm PANEL # 3 Effectiveness 2: Where Does Power Come From?; discussion moderated by Corinne Bonnet (PLH-ERASME, UTM)


• Anne-Caroline Rendu Loisel (Université de Genève ) Voice and Radiance of Mighty Copper in a Ritual of Ancient Mesopotamia • Adeline Grand-Clément (PLH-ERASME, UTM ) Colors, Rituals, and Religious Norms in Ancient Greece

• Cécile Guillaume (Queen's University of Belfast, UK) Healing, Charming, or Killing: The Power of regam among the Soras (A Tribe from Central Eastern India) • Jean-Pierre Albert (EHESS, CAS-LISST) The Roman Catholic Eucharist and the Host: from Virtually Nothing to Infinity (and Back)

Saturday June 1 st

9:00 am–12 pm PANEL # 4 Transcendence and Immanence: Concepts and Things ; discussion moderated by Nicolas Ellison (EHESS, CAS-LISST)

• Webb Keane (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA ) Rotting bodies: Semiotic ideologies in conflict • Morten Axel Pedersen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark ) Unthinking Things: Keeping Spirits Avisible in Northern Mongolia • Martin Holbraad (University College London , UK) On pragmatology: from things to concepts

Lunch break

15:00–16:30 pm Closing session Roundtable of all the panelists moderated by Jean-P ierre Albert (EHESS, CAS-LISST)

Ethnographers, whether their research results in producing texts or in curating museum collections, seem to share an interest in material artifacts whose symbolic and social functions might be easier to describe than to find their common denominator. Among such artifacts, some are written about as ritual, magical, or power objects, or “idols,” “relics,” and “fetishes,” and given, by the cultures that create them, specific names: agalmata and xoana in ancient Greece, churinga in Australia, boli and basi among the Mande, etc. Others might, despite the strangeness of their power, pass almost unnoticed, like so many materials consecrated by the early Christians, for example, or as certain objects and substances used both within religious contexts and in everyday life as well. Indeed, in analyzing rites, one may observe an ordinary knife becoming the instrument for sacrifices, water the liquid for ablutions, a pan the indispensable receptacle for the communal meal, and a shirt the outfit for the priest. Truly great, then, is the number of elements necessary for the transformation of the universe, for the transition from the day-to-day into this different realm, which is generally saturated with religious meanings. In this realm and in the spaces of transition, things seem to possess more power than a reasonable mind would normally allocate to them. What makes them so potent and how do they attain such a status? How are these powerful


artifacts produced? And how exactly does one manipulate or interact with them in order to affect such a transformation?

The aim of this conference is to reinvigorate the discussion of these topics, debated for such a long time by anthropologists and historians of religion, through confrontation of the historical and ethnographic data with new theoretical frames—Ando 2011, Bazin 2008, Boyer 1994 et 1996, Colleyn 2004 et 2009, Freedberg 1989, Gell 1998, Henare et al. 2007, Houseman 2011, Ingold 2007, Jackson et Karp 1990, Moisseff 1994, Spyer 1998, Strathern 1999, Taussig 1993 et 2009, Viveiros de Castro 1998, Wagner 1991 et 2001, Willerslev 2007, etc.—that may well help to formulate new conclusions. These insights point toward four main axes of interrogation upon which the participants will be invited to further elaborate, thus opening the way for comparisons:

1. The importance of context, particularly of the ritual frame, for the staging/ production of the power object. To what extent does the object’s potency depend upon the effectiveness of the ritual in which it is used, and its cognitive and relational specificity? To what extent is it independent of any ritual situation?

2. The role that aesthetic factors play in the construction of the objects’ efficacy: the influence of certain forms soliciting an enchantment or to the contrary, cognitive troubling, intimidation inspired by the splendor of the performance or the abundance of rich material. In this last respect, the choices surely rely on culturally pre-existent hierarchies. Yet, more than symbols of some political or metaphysical power aren’t aesthetic forms its crystallization or means indispensable to achieve it?

3. The significance of figuration: both mimetic accuracy as well as voluntary distortions guiding the act of representation towards hybrid combinations that figure the monstrous or towards an absolute aniconicity. Does such aniconicity suggest, as certain authors argue, that the power of the objects lies in their irreducible “thing-ness”? What, then, could be said about the role of anthropomorphism?

4. Recognition by social actors of the personhood or agency of objects leading to the denunciation of the inconsistency of all binary categorizations (object/subject; substance/object, surface/volume; animate/inanimate; thing/concept, matter/idea, etc.).

All the aforementioned topics, which partially overlap, will be addressed within an interdisciplinary (anthropology, art history, and history) and comparative (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, medieval and modern Europe, and Antiquity) framework which should permit a confrontation of various theoretical and methodological viewpoints with diversified field and historical material. As a result of sharing our research and ‘thinking together through things’, we expect the emergence of new hypotheses in respect to the types of objects et substances under discussion and of the eventual sources of their power.

REFERENCES

Albert, J.P., 1990, Odeurs de sainteté : la mythologie chrétienne des aromates, Paris : Editions de l’EHESS -----------------2005, « Qui croit à la transsubstantiation ?, l’Homme, 175-176. Albert-Llorca, M., 1994, « La fabrique du sacré. Les vierges ‘miraculeuses’ du pays valencien », Genèses 17: 33-51. ----------------------2002, Les vierges miraculeuses : légendes et rituels, Paris : Gallimard. Allen, C.J., 2002, The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in Andean Community, Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, second edition. Ando, C., 2010, “Praesentia numini. Part: The visibility of Roman gods.” Asdiwal 5: 45-74.


----------------2011, “Praesentia numini. Part 2: Objects in Roman cult.”, Asdiwal 6 : 57-69. Bazin, J., 2008, Les clous dans la Joconde, Toulouse : Anacharsis. Bouchy, A., 2003, « Une voie de l' 'art premier' dans le Japon du XVIIe siècle - La statuaire d'Enkû, pérégrin de l'Essentiel », L'Homme 165: 143-172. Boyer, P., 1994, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: a Cognitive Theory of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press. --------------1996, “What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(1): 83-97. Brett-Smith, S., 2001, “When is an Object Finished: the Creation of the Invisible among the Bamana of Mali”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 39: 99- 132. Colleyn, J-P., 1985 « Objets forts et rapports sociaux », Système de pensée en Afrique Noire 8 : 221–261. -----------------2001 Bamana: the art of existence in Mali. New York: Museum for African Art; Zurich: Museum Rietberg; Gent: Snoek-Ducaju & Zoon. -----------------2004 « L’alliance, le dieu, l’objet. » L’Homme 170 : 61–75. -----------------2009 « Images, signes, fétiches. A propos de l’art bamana (Mali).» Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 195 : 773 – 747. Carrin, M., 1986, La fleur et l'os: symbolisme et rituel chez les Santal, Paris : Ed. EHESS. Ciambelli, P. & Vassas, C., 2010, « ‘La boîte en os’ ou de l’art d’adopter des têtes. » La part de l’œil, 25-46. Freedberg, D., 1989, The Power of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gell, A., 1988, Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gergely, G., 2009 “Kinds of Agents: The Origins of Understanding Instrumental and Communicative Agency.” In: Blacwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development. 2nd Edition, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graeber, D., 2005, “Fetishism as Social Creativity: or, Fetishes as Gods in the process of Construction”, Anthropological Theory 5: 407 – 438. Henare, A., Holbraad, M & Wastell, S., 2007, Thinking Through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically, London: Routledge. Houseman, M. 2012, Le rouge est le noir : Essai sur le rituel, Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Ingold, T., 2007, “Materials against materiality”, Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1 – 16. Jackson, M. & I. Karp (dir.), 1990, Personhood and Agency: the Experience of Self and Others in African Cultures, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Keane, W., 1997, “From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (4): 674-693. Kedzierska- Manzon, A., 2013, “Humans and Things: Mande ‘fetishes’ as Subjects”, the Anthropological Quarterly, à paraître. Moisseeff, M., 1994 « Les Objets Cultuels Aborigènes ou comment représenter l’irreprésentable.», Genèses 17: 8-32. MacGaffey, W., 1994, “African Objects and the Idea of the Fetish”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 25: 123–31. Pouillon, J., 1970, “Fétiches sans fétichisme” Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 2 : 135–147. Pietz, W. 1985, “The Problem of the Fetish I”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9: 5–17. ------------1986, “The Problem of the Fetish II: The Origin of the Fetish”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13: 23–45. ------------1987, “The Problem of the Fetish IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment Theory of Fetishism”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16:105–23. Spyer, P. (dir.) 1998, Bording Fetishism: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. London: Routledge. Strathern, M, 1988, The Gender of the Gift. University of California Press, Berkeley. ----------------- 1999, Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London; New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press. Taussig, M., 1993, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge; London. ---------------2009, What Color is the Sacred. Chicago: Chicago University Press.


Tomasello, M., 1999, The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vassas, C., 2009, "Objets rituels et rituels d'objets : le vacarme des Ténèbres". Monuments et décors de la Semaine sainte en Méditerranée : arts, rituels, liturgies, in : Albert-Llorca, M., Aribaud, C., Lugand, J., et Mathon, J-B. Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail : 313-322. Viveiros de Castro, E., 1998, “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469 - 488. Wagner, R. 1991. “The Fractal Person”, in: Godelier, M. & Strathern, M. Big Man and Great Man: Personifications of Power in Melanesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ---------------2001 The Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willerslev, R. 2007, Soul Hunters. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CONTACT / REGISTRATION:

Agnès Kedzierska- Manzon

Centre d'Anthropologie Sociale, Maison de la recherche, UTM, 5 allées

Antonio Machado, 31058. Toulouse Cedex 9

++ 33 (0)5 61 50 25 39

Email: [email protected]

Power of Object

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