Home My Favourite Lévi-Strauss: international seminar to celebrate the birth centenary of legendary anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, January 12th 2008
The French Embassy in India has the pleasure to invite you to the international seminar to celebrate the birth centenary of legendary anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss entitled My Favourite Lévi-Strauss. This programme is hosted by the India International Centre.
The inaugural programme will be graced by : H.E. Jérôme Bonnafont, Ambassador and Prof. Andre Béteille, Professor Emeritus, Delhi University at the Main Auditorium of India International Centre, (Main) at 10.30 am, January 12, 2009
The French Embassy in India has the pleasure to invite you to the international seminar to celebrate the birth centenary of legendary anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss entitled My Favourite Lévi-Strauss. This programme is hosted by the India International Centre.
The inaugural programme will be graced by : H.E. Jérôme Bonnafont, Ambassador and Prof. Andre Béteille, Professor Emeritus, Delhi University at the Main Auditorium of India International Centre, (Main) at 10.30 am, January 12, 2009
Note to editors: The International conference on Claude Lévi-Strauss will span over two days with participation of leading scholars from three continents such as Philippe Descola (Collège de France, France), Jean Camaroff (Chicago University, USA), Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics, UK), Vincent Debaene (Columbia University, USA), H. S. Gill (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India). Noted sociologist Prof. Dipankar Gupta has played the pivotal point to organize this international conference. The scholars will discuss the contribution of Claude Lévi-Strauss in shaping and reshaping the study of man in society. (cf. concept note, programme with bio-notes & topics)
For further information please contact: 9811922952, 24196137
International conference on My favourite Lévi-Strauss
Inauguration Venue: Auditorium IIC Main Time: 10.30 am. by H.E. The Ambassador of France, Mr. Jérôme Bonnafont Proffessor Andre Béteille, Proffessor Emeritus, Delhi University
Lunch Break Time: 12.00 am. Venue: Main Veranda
12 January at 1.30 pm. Venue: Conference Room No. 2 – IIC (Main) Chaired by: Prof. Dipankar Gupta, JNU
’From Nature to Culture and Back’ Philippe Descola (Collège de France)
‘“Naming” Conversion: Sacred in the Life of Gulzar Raza’ Deepak Mehta, (University of Delhi)
Infectiousness of Symbols Jean Comaroff (University of Chicago)
Why should philosophy matter to anthropology? Pradeep Dhillon (University of Illinois)
13 January 2009 at 9.30 am. Venue: Conference Room No. 2 – IIC (Main) Chaired by: Prof. Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics)
‘On Language and the Assumed Unity of the Human Sciences’ Franson Manjali (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
“Claude Lévi-Strauss 2008: what anniversary?” Vincent Debaene (Columbia University)
‘On Why a Cousin Becomes a Spouse? Elementary, says Lévi-Strauss’ Rita Brara (University of Delhi)
The Myth on the Wall: Analysing Phad Paintings of Rajastan Kavita Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
13 January 2009 at 2.00 pm Venue: Conference Room No. 2 – IIC (Main) Chaired by: Professor Kapila Vatsayan
‘Diachrony in the Structuralist Method: the Mythologiques of Lévi-Strauss’ Harjit S. Gill (Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
To Transform or to Transmorph: From Totemism to Traffic Lights to Caste Dipankar Gupta (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
‘The Science of the Concrete, a Great Idea’ Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics)
Film: The Other Men (85 mins) Followed by High Tea
* subject to change, please check with the organisers
Concept note:
In celebrating the 100th birthday of Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to revive a major inspirational fount of much of our received knowledge as anthropologists. For more than five decades, Professor Lévi-Strauss has influenced professional anthropologists, and indeed scholars in all the social sciences through his wide ranging researches, made all the more remarkable by his novel explication of structuralism. One can easily say that after Lévi-Strauss, the way we think can never be the same.
Quite like the myths he wrote about with such finesse, Lévi-Strauss’s own works have devotees and followers who lean more heavily on this or that text of the master. We all have our favourite Lévi-Strauss who stands by our side guiding our research and teaching with the complete conviction that there is a unity that binds humankind.
Accordingly, in this conference, we have asked our contributors to speak about how their favourite Lévi-Strauss has been a constant source of encouragement to them. The emphasis will, therefore, will not be on interpreting Lévi-Strauss ‘correctly’, or in debating over what he ‘really said’, but rather on what he meant to us in our active commitment as professional anthropologists. Speakers:
Philippe Descola is a foremost anthropologist from France. He was a fellow of the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in philosophy. Later on, he did his doctoral thesis under the guidance of Claude Lévi-Strauss at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes His ethnographic studies in the Amazon region began in 1976 and his reputation largely arises from these studies. He is currently chair of anthropology at the Collège de France. Amongst his highly acclaimed publications are Les lances du crépuscule (Terre Humaine, 1994) and Par-delà nature et culture (Gallimard, 2005). Deepak Mehta teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi). His research interests center around the study of material culture, the sociology of Muslim groups in India and the sociology of violence. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India from Oxford University Press. He has co-authored Living with Violence: An anthropology of events and everyday life from Routledge. He co-edited a special issue of Domain entitled Riot Discourses with Roma Chatterjee. Jean Comaroff is Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, and in the Clinical Scholars Program, has conduced fieldwork in southern Africa and Great Britain and is interested in colonialism, modernity, ritual, power, and consciousness. Her specific foci of study have included the religion of the Southern Tswana peoples (past and present); colonialism and Christian evangelism and liberation struggles in southern Africa; healing and bodily practice, and the making of local worlds in the wake of global "modernity" and commodification. Her current research concerns problems of public order, state sovereignty and policing in postcolonial contexts, and the challenging relation of legitimacy to force. She has been published widely in the related areas. Pradeep Dhillon teaches at the University of Illinois. Her research straddles philosophy of language (both Analytic and Continental) and mind, aesthetics, and international education. Currently, she is working in the areas of Kant’s theory of judgement and Neuro-aesthetics, Neurophilosophy, and Education, and Environmental Aesthetics. She is the Editor for the Journal of Aesthetic Education, and serves as the Chair of Education for the American Society for Aesthetics. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education from Stanford University. She has several publications to her credit. Franson Manjali teaches linguistics and semiotics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests include: Ethics, Aesthetics & Linguistics, Philosophies of Discourse, Poetics and Politics of Language, Metaphors in Cultural Discourse, Semiotic Analysis of Narratives. His major publications are Literature and Infinity, Meaning, Culture and Cognition (2000), Nuclear Semantics – Towards a Theory of Rational Meaning (1991). He translated from French the book Morphogenesis of Meaning by Jean Petitot. And edited several volumes. Vincent Debaene received his academic training in France, where he was a fellow of the École normale supérieure. He took the Agrégation de lettres modernes in 1996 and received his doctorate from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2004. His teaching and research interests include French anthropology, 20th-Century French literature, literary theory, intellectual history, and the points of contact between scientific discourses and literature. Debaene was in charge of the edition of the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. His dissertation on the relationship between literature and anthropology in 20th-Century France, “L’Adieu au voyage”, will be published by Gallimard in 2009 in the "Bibliothèque des sciences humaines" series. Rita Brara teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. Her research concerns the study of kinship, agrarian society and rural development, urban city culture and film. She is the author of Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons (2005). Kavita Singh is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University where she teaches courses on the history of Indian painting and curatorial studies. Trained as an art historian, she has previously worked at the Asia Society, New York, and the San Diego Museum of Art. She is currently researching a book on the history and politics of museums in India. Dr Singh has published on Sikh art, Indian folk and courtly painting, museum studies and contemporary art in India and Pakistan. Her most recent curatorial project, Where in the World, Indian art in the era of globalization, is currently on view at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon. Harjit S. Gill is Emeritus Professor of Semiotics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Dipankar Gupta is a professor School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is teaching since 1980. He writes and speaks regularly in the media on economics, society and culture. Amongst his publications are Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds (Harpercollins 2000), Culture, Space and Nation State (Sage, 2000), Interrogating Caste (Penguin, 2000), Learning to Forget : The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2005). His latest book the Caged Finix: Will India Fly is to be released in April 2009). Maurice Bloch is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His research interest includes cognitive anthropology, education, ideology, literacy and Madagascar. He has many titles to his credit, including L’anthropologie cognitive à l’epreuve du terrain published from Fayard and Essays on cultural transmission from Berg. He co-authored Teknonymy and the evocation of the "social" among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar, Cambridge University Press. Home Embassy News Citizen Services Visas Contact us Site index Disclamer Webmaster
For further information please contact: 9811922952, 24196137
International conference on My favourite Lévi-Strauss
Inauguration Venue: Auditorium IIC Main Time: 10.30 am. by H.E. The Ambassador of France, Mr. Jérôme Bonnafont Proffessor Andre Béteille, Proffessor Emeritus, Delhi University
Lunch Break Time: 12.00 am. Venue: Main Veranda
12 January at 1.30 pm. Venue: Conference Room No. 2 – IIC (Main) Chaired by: Prof. Dipankar Gupta, JNU
’From Nature to Culture and Back’ Philippe Descola (Collège de France)
‘“Naming” Conversion: Sacred in the Life of Gulzar Raza’ Deepak Mehta, (University of Delhi)
Infectiousness of Symbols Jean Comaroff (University of Chicago)
Why should philosophy matter to anthropology? Pradeep Dhillon (University of Illinois)
13 January 2009 at 9.30 am. Venue: Conference Room No. 2 – IIC (Main) Chaired by: Prof. Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics)
‘On Language and the Assumed Unity of the Human Sciences’ Franson Manjali (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
“Claude Lévi-Strauss 2008: what anniversary?” Vincent Debaene (Columbia University)
‘On Why a Cousin Becomes a Spouse? Elementary, says Lévi-Strauss’ Rita Brara (University of Delhi)
The Myth on the Wall: Analysing Phad Paintings of Rajastan Kavita Singh (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
13 January 2009 at 2.00 pm Venue: Conference Room No. 2 – IIC (Main) Chaired by: Professor Kapila Vatsayan
‘Diachrony in the Structuralist Method: the Mythologiques of Lévi-Strauss’ Harjit S. Gill (Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
To Transform or to Transmorph: From Totemism to Traffic Lights to Caste Dipankar Gupta (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
‘The Science of the Concrete, a Great Idea’ Maurice Bloch (London School of Economics)
Film: The Other Men (85 mins) Followed by High Tea
* subject to change, please check with the organisers
Concept note:
In celebrating the 100th birthday of Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to revive a major inspirational fount of much of our received knowledge as anthropologists. For more than five decades, Professor Lévi-Strauss has influenced professional anthropologists, and indeed scholars in all the social sciences through his wide ranging researches, made all the more remarkable by his novel explication of structuralism. One can easily say that after Lévi-Strauss, the way we think can never be the same.
Quite like the myths he wrote about with such finesse, Lévi-Strauss’s own works have devotees and followers who lean more heavily on this or that text of the master. We all have our favourite Lévi-Strauss who stands by our side guiding our research and teaching with the complete conviction that there is a unity that binds humankind.
Accordingly, in this conference, we have asked our contributors to speak about how their favourite Lévi-Strauss has been a constant source of encouragement to them. The emphasis will, therefore, will not be on interpreting Lévi-Strauss ‘correctly’, or in debating over what he ‘really said’, but rather on what he meant to us in our active commitment as professional anthropologists. Speakers:
Philippe Descola is a foremost anthropologist from France. He was a fellow of the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in philosophy. Later on, he did his doctoral thesis under the guidance of Claude Lévi-Strauss at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes His ethnographic studies in the Amazon region began in 1976 and his reputation largely arises from these studies. He is currently chair of anthropology at the Collège de France. Amongst his highly acclaimed publications are Les lances du crépuscule (Terre Humaine, 1994) and Par-delà nature et culture (Gallimard, 2005). Deepak Mehta teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi). His research interests center around the study of material culture, the sociology of Muslim groups in India and the sociology of violence. He is the author of Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India from Oxford University Press. He has co-authored Living with Violence: An anthropology of events and everyday life from Routledge. He co-edited a special issue of Domain entitled Riot Discourses with Roma Chatterjee. Jean Comaroff is Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, and in the Clinical Scholars Program, has conduced fieldwork in southern Africa and Great Britain and is interested in colonialism, modernity, ritual, power, and consciousness. Her specific foci of study have included the religion of the Southern Tswana peoples (past and present); colonialism and Christian evangelism and liberation struggles in southern Africa; healing and bodily practice, and the making of local worlds in the wake of global "modernity" and commodification. Her current research concerns problems of public order, state sovereignty and policing in postcolonial contexts, and the challenging relation of legitimacy to force. She has been published widely in the related areas. Pradeep Dhillon teaches at the University of Illinois. Her research straddles philosophy of language (both Analytic and Continental) and mind, aesthetics, and international education. Currently, she is working in the areas of Kant’s theory of judgement and Neuro-aesthetics, Neurophilosophy, and Education, and Environmental Aesthetics. She is the Editor for the Journal of Aesthetic Education, and serves as the Chair of Education for the American Society for Aesthetics. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education from Stanford University. She has several publications to her credit. Franson Manjali teaches linguistics and semiotics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests include: Ethics, Aesthetics & Linguistics, Philosophies of Discourse, Poetics and Politics of Language, Metaphors in Cultural Discourse, Semiotic Analysis of Narratives. His major publications are Literature and Infinity, Meaning, Culture and Cognition (2000), Nuclear Semantics – Towards a Theory of Rational Meaning (1991). He translated from French the book Morphogenesis of Meaning by Jean Petitot. And edited several volumes. Vincent Debaene received his academic training in France, where he was a fellow of the École normale supérieure. He took the Agrégation de lettres modernes in 1996 and received his doctorate from the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 2004. His teaching and research interests include French anthropology, 20th-Century French literature, literary theory, intellectual history, and the points of contact between scientific discourses and literature. Debaene was in charge of the edition of the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. His dissertation on the relationship between literature and anthropology in 20th-Century France, “L’Adieu au voyage”, will be published by Gallimard in 2009 in the "Bibliothèque des sciences humaines" series. Rita Brara teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi. Her research concerns the study of kinship, agrarian society and rural development, urban city culture and film. She is the author of Shifting Landscapes: The Making and Remaking of Village Commons (2005). Kavita Singh is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University where she teaches courses on the history of Indian painting and curatorial studies. Trained as an art historian, she has previously worked at the Asia Society, New York, and the San Diego Museum of Art. She is currently researching a book on the history and politics of museums in India. Dr Singh has published on Sikh art, Indian folk and courtly painting, museum studies and contemporary art in India and Pakistan. Her most recent curatorial project, Where in the World, Indian art in the era of globalization, is currently on view at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon. Harjit S. Gill is Emeritus Professor of Semiotics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Dipankar Gupta is a professor School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is teaching since 1980. He writes and speaks regularly in the media on economics, society and culture. Amongst his publications are Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds (Harpercollins 2000), Culture, Space and Nation State (Sage, 2000), Interrogating Caste (Penguin, 2000), Learning to Forget : The Anti-Memoirs of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2005). His latest book the Caged Finix: Will India Fly is to be released in April 2009). Maurice Bloch is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. His research interest includes cognitive anthropology, education, ideology, literacy and Madagascar. He has many titles to his credit, including L’anthropologie cognitive à l’epreuve du terrain published from Fayard and Essays on cultural transmission from Berg. He co-authored Teknonymy and the evocation of the "social" among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar, Cambridge University Press. Home Embassy News Citizen Services Visas Contact us Site index Disclamer Webmaster
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