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 1983-2009:

2009

Comparing Concerns: Some issues in organ and other donations
Marilyn Strathern
Professor of Anthropology, Cambridge University

Abstract:
In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of organ and tissue donation, and the debates to which current practices give rise. Donation is only one of several modes of procurement, organs only one kind of body part that can be donated, and people offer comparisons just as commentators do. Perhaps here is an answer to the question of how to make a reasonable account out of a fraught and infinitely expandable nexus of public concerns. Is it possible to conserve the complexity of the issues while not letting the sheer quantity of information run away with itself? Would following through the comparisons do the trick?
• Introduction to Professor Strathern’s lecture
• Published in the Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 4/2009

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
(Invited by the Westermarck Society)

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