This is a past event
This year's Radcliffe Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology will take place at the University of Aberdeen, following on from the British Academy in London. We welcome Professor Wang Mingming from Peking University. Please join us in Aberdeen on Thursday 30 March for what promises to be a most interesting event.
Some turns in a 'journey to the West': Cosmological proliferation in an anthropology of Eurasia
Professor Wang Mingming, Peking University
In the anthropology of ‘ontologies’, cosmologies are commonly characterised as distinct. But this does not take account of the overlapping nature of the ‘cultures’ or ‘civilisations’ to which they refer. Understanding society as the internal and external relations of persons, things and divinities, we can in fact see different ideas of selfhood and otherness as recurring transformations of each other.
In Eurasia, this is especially true. Here, ‘cultures’ or ‘civilisations’ have been at the same time different and related as well as ‘similar’. Furthermore, the so-called ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions making up Eurasian cosmologies are really class-based distinctions, which are reversible over time. The little traditions – whose ‘life-giving myths’ and ‘animism’ have made the anthropologies of the south (e.g., Australia, South America, and Melanesia) and the north (e.g., the frontiers of the Arctic Circle and Siberia) relevant to those of the east and west – appear to be the more resilient.
- Speaker
- Professor Wang Mingming
- Hosted by
- Radcliffe Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology
- Venue
- MacRobert Building
- Contact
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FREE. Registration not required.
Date: Thursday 30th March 2017
Time: 17.30
Venue: MR051 MacRobert Building, King's College, University of Aberdeen
Note: A reception following the lecture will be held in the back of MacRobert Café.If you have any questions about this event please contact Alyson Millar at alysonmillar@abdn.ac.uk