Westermarck lectures
Westermarck Memorial Lectures
Edvard Westermarck (1862-1939) is known as the pioneer of Finnish anthropology and sociology. In 1983 the Finnish Anthropological Society together with the Westermarck Society of Finnish Sociologists organized a lecture series honouring the late Professor Westermarck which has flourished since then.These lectures are held annually, alternating between the two learned societies.
Numerous leading anthropologists have given the lecture in which they have touched on a wide range of current and debated issues in the discipline.
The Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lectures organized by the Finnish Anthropological Society 1983-2007:
2007
Religious Practice and the Claims of Anthropology (1)
Webb Keane
Professor of Anthropology
University of Michigan
The Westermack Lecture of 2007 was delivered by Professor Webb Keane. It drew on his recent book, Christian Moderns (University of California Press 2007), and explored what he calls “semiotic ideologies”, or reflexive beliefs people share about language, arts, or any meaning-making process or practice. Highlighting a contrast between ideologies such as Calvinist theology, that seek to purify meaning of its necessarily material manifestations, and those ideologies that locate meaning in the very materiality of their signs (for instance, ancestor worship and so-called fetishes), Keane argues for attending to the ways in which traditions reflexively problematize practices of signification. The Westermarck Lecture particularly focused on definitions of religion and how they feature in the
contest of cultural interpretations more broadly. The lecture has been published in Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish
Anthropological Society 1/2008.
2005
Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: Western Illusion of Human Nature (2)
Marshall Sahlins
Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences
University of Chicago
The Westermarck Lecture of 2005 was given by Professor Marshall
Sahlins. In it, Professor Sahlins returned to a theme about which he has often written – western culture, its mental traditions and legacies – examining the western view of human nature and its implications for social science and government. According to Sahlins, “For more than two millennia, the peoples we call “Western” have been haunted by the spectre of their own inner being: an apparition of human nature so avaricious and contentious that, unless it is somehow governed, it will reduce society to anarchy.” Delivered also as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values, the lecture was translated into Finnish and published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2005.
2003
The ‘Becoming-Past’ of Places: Spacetime and Memory in mid-19th Century New York City (3)
Nancy Munn
Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Social Sciences
Professor of Anthropology
University of Chicago
2001
Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Culture of the State (4)
Bruce Kapferer
Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Bergen
1999
The Reprojective Basis of Human Society (5)
Roy Wagner
Professor of Anthropology
University of Virginia
1997
From One Human Nature to Many Human Conditions: An Anthropological Enquiry into Suffering as Moral Experience in a Disordering Age (6)
Arthur Kleinman
Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University
1993
Contentious Subjects: Moral Being in the Modern World (6)
Jean Comaroff
Professor of Anthropology
University of Chicago
1992
Internal and External Memory: Different Ways of Being in History (6)
Maurice Bloch
Professor of Anthropology
London School of Economics
1989
Late Twentieth Century Strategies for Producing Ethnography (6)
George E. Marcus
Professor of Anthropology
Rice University
1988
Misconceived Kinship or, How Nature Imitates Culture (6)
Claude Meillassoux (1925-2005)
Professor
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
(Westermarck –seuran kutsumana)
1987
Rationality between Sociologists and Anthropologists or, The Fetishism of Culture (6)
Ernest Gellner (1925-1995)
Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
1985
How Institutions Think (6)
Mary Douglas (1921-2007)
Professor of Anthropology
University College London
1984
Incorporation and Identity in the Making of the Modern World (6)
Eric R. Wolf (1923-1999)
Professor of Anthropology
City University of New York
1983
History and Structure (6)
Marshall Sahlins
Professor of Anthropology
University of Chicago
(1) Published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 1/2008
(2) Published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 4/2005
(3) Published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 1/2004
(4) Published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 2/2002
(5) Published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 1/2000
(6) Published in Developing Anthropological Ideas: The Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lectures 1983-1997 (Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society 41; Helsinki, 1998)