Workshop 26

Engaging Social Change: Imagination and Appropriation in a Glocalised World

In recent years the power of the imagination as the capacity to envision and create new possibilities of human existence has sparked anthropological interest. This promising and enriching line of enquiry enables us to incorporate contingency and the indeterminate in human experience that constitutes us as agents and subjects. However, many studies have treated the phenomenon as an enthusiastic celebration of emancipation, neglecting the often ambivalent conditions of possibility of any imaginative endeavor, not to mention the serious, even violent consequences such endeavors sometimes may have. Other studies have focused on ‘imaginaries’ as frameworks that structure how actors view and act on their world. Yet, in so doing they have bracketed the very contingency, indeterminacy and openness of these frameworks, sidelining questions concerning how human subjects brought these imaginaries into being in the first place, and most importantly the role of actors in the reproduction, transformation or subversion of these imaginaries –in other words, the impact that imagination as practice and process has on the complex relationships between the social structure and agency.

This year’s conference provides a fitting opportunity to examine these practical and processual moments of imagination. Underlying strategies of cultural appropriation are highly creative engagements with translocal and global cultural flows. How actors appropriate these flows depends on how they imagine their own horizon, that point of orientation marking the limits of their own realm while providing guidance in navigating as yet uncharted realms. As such, central to understanding imagination are actor’s endeavors to reconcile openness with closure, negotiate between innovation or progress and authenticity or identity, establish continuity so as to bridge socio-economic or political shifts or create or maintain structure and coherence in times of radical flux. At the same time, imaginings are always both conditioned and made possible by pre-existing economies of symbols, discourses and knowledge that either limit or provide a point of departure towards new horizons of meaning. Moreover, socio-economic and political inequalities stir desires for new possibilities while circumscribing limits to the imaginable. Among the issues that therefore arise are: the relationships and dynamics between pre-existing power relations, symbolic economies, contingent events and the emergence of new imaginings; the trajectories of imaginings such as (in)authenticity, identity, righteousness, nation, belonging, etc. and how they become or are made socially powerful in specific contexts; or the processes and practices that bring shared imaginaries into being--i.e. via common social activities or experiences, rituals, shared work towards a common goal (as in NGOs, grass-roots organizations, etc)--and the impact they have on pre-existing social orders.

This panel welcomes contributions to an anthropology of imagination as it pertains to actors’ appropriating of translocal or global cultural flows as manifested through narratives, images, objects, practices, etc. in the context of existing symbolic economies and socio-political and economic power relations. 

If you have further questions, please contact Katja Rieck (katja.rieck@normativeorders.net) or Dominik Müller (dominikmueller@em.uni-frankfurt.de).

Termin / Raum

Freitag, 02.10.2009, 17.15 bis 19.00 Uhr / Raum 457

Vorträge inkl. Abstracts als pdf

17:15
Katja Rieck (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main): Introductory Remarks

17:25-17:45
Bernhard Schittich (Albert‐Ludwigs‐Universität Freiburg im Breisgau): Aneignungs- und Abgrenzungsprozesse in der transnationalen Revitalisierung des mongolischen Buddhismus

17:45 – 18:05
Dominik Müller (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main): TBA

18:05-18:25
Sebastian Schüler (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster): Imagining Gods Kingdom: The Construction of Sacred Landscapes in Pentecostal Prayer Chains

18:25-19:00
Discussion
Moderator: Katja Rieck