Edvard Westermarck (1862-1939) tunnetaan suomalaisen antropologian ja sosiologian vaikutusvaltaisena edelläkävijänä. Suomen Antropologinen seura on järjestänyt vuodesta 1983 vuorovuosina yhdessä sosiologien Westermarck-seuran kanssa Edvard Westermarck -muistoluennon.
Seura on kutsunut luennoitsijoiksi kansanvälisesti tunnettuja antropologeja. Luennot ovat käsitelleet antropologian ajankohtaisia ja kiistanalaisia kysymyksiä. Osa luennoista on julkaistu myös seuran julkaisemassa teoksessa Developing Anthropological Ideas: The Edvard Westermarck Memorial Lectures 1983-1997 (SAS 1998).
Suomen Antropologisen Seuran vuosina 1983-2017 järjestämät Edvard Westermarck –muistoluennot:
2019
Fixing Inequalities in Time: Radicalising Westermarck’s moral emotions for a critique of financialised speculation
Laura Bear
Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics
Abstract:
Why should we care about inequalities in Time and why fix these now? When we reflect on our informants’ insecurity, the time-pressures academics face or the precarity of the earth —time and timing appear as urgent issues. Why is this, and how do we fix it? How do we generate an abundance of time and widely shared secure futures? To answer these questions we need to understand, and then change, the moral action that creates the timescapes we live in. This moral action is financialised speculation built on limited sympathy and an anti-altruism, which has intensified uncertainty. To guide our exploration of this speculation I will return to an earlier moment of anthropological critique—Westermarck’s engagements with Adam Smith. Through his comparative project of exploring moral emotions Westermarck challenged the ethical and epistemic foundations of older forms of speculation. This is particularly visible, although not solely, in his analysis of slavery and racism. Using Westermarck’s insights we can similarly critique the emerging field of narrative and behavioural economics linked to newer forms of financialised capitalism. However we also need to go further, by exploring the political economy that links moral-affective action to timescapes of accumulation and inequalities in time. I will illustrate this approach with examples from my fieldwork with central banks and maritime economies. My conclusion will address how to create a new abundance of time through reform of government and financial institutions. This could be achieved through a new kind of speculation that explicitly addresses how to achieve altruism, unlimited sympathy and social value.
2017
Metalwork: Processes of Making and the Imagination
Liisa Malkki
Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Abstract:
This paper is an ethnographic status report on two years of training in metalwork with a master smith and ongoing conversations with metal artists. My training in silversmithing is ongoing, and will be one element in a larger, multi-sited project on embodied processes and practices of making, the senses, and on making as a form of thinking. The research will be conducted with metalwork artists/artisans in California, Finland, and Ghana, and will be a close, exploratory examination of how metalworkers bodily make things and how they think about making, “creativity” and the imagination. Learning how to make things in metal and the experience of undergoing rigorous training are as essential to the project as learning a field language. In this process, it has been necessary to think critically about how the imagination is often linked with “creativity” — and in turn how “creation” is so often valued over “recreation”, production over reproduction, and “high art” over “mere craft”.
2015
Landscape as Transfiguration
Philippe Descola
Professor, chair holder in the Anthropology of Nature, Collège de France
Abstract:
Definitions of what is a landscape vary between a very loose meaning – an environment transformed by human action or subjectively apprehended – and a very narrow one: the pictorial or literary depiction of a piece of land embraced by sight. A third approach will be favoured, based on the study of the process of transfiguration thanks to which a landscape is constituted. Transfiguration deliberately changes the appearance of a site – through its representation or its arrangement – so that it becomes an iconic sign that stand for something else and renders manifest some of its implicit features. Traces of this process will be examined in native Amazonia, among cultures where there traditionally exists neither figuration of landscape nor pleasure gardens.
2013
Anthropology Beyond Humanity
Tim Ingold
Professor of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
2011
Transcendence and the Anthropology of Christianity
Joel Robbins
University of California, San Diego
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?
• Professori Strathernin luennon esittely
• julkaistu Suomen Antropologin numerossa 4/2009
2007
Religious Practice and the Claims of Anthropology (1)
Webb Keane
Professor of Anthropology
University of Michigan
Vuoden 2007 Westermarck–luennoitsija, professori Webb Kean on tutkinut kielen, lahjojen ja rahan semiotiikkaa, modernisuutta ja historiallista tietoisuutta sekä yhteiskuntatieteiden filosofisia perusteita. Hän on tehnyt kenttätyötä Indonesiassa, jossa hän on tutkinut rituaalista kieltä ja seremoniaalisia vaihtosuhteita sekä kalvinistisen lähetystyön ja kansallisten lingvististen reformien vaikutusta Pienten Sunda-saarten yhteiskuntaan. Westermarck-luennolla professori Kean tarkasteli erityisesti sitä, miten uskontoa on hyödyllisintä lähestyä tarkasteltaessa sosiaalisten käytäntöjen ja ideologisten prosessien vuorovaikutusta. Semioottinen näkökulma painotti uskonnollisten käytäntöjen materiaalisuutta ja muuttuvia ideologisia tulkintoja. Luento on julkaistu Suomen Antropologi –lehdessä 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
Vuoden 2005 Edvard Westermarck –muistoluennon piti professori Marshall Sahlins. Sahlins palasi luennolla usein käsittelemäänsä teemaan: länsimaiseen kulttuuriin, sen perintöön ja vaikutuksiin. Westermarck-luento tarkasteli länsimaista ihmiskuvaa ja sen vaikutusta yhteiskuntatieteisiin. Sahlinsin mukaan: ”Yli kahden vuosituhannen ajan, ”länsimaisiksi” kutsumiamme kansoja on vainonnut niiden oman sisimmän olemuksen haamu: niin ahnas ja riitaisa ihmisluonnon kuvatus, että ilman jonkinlaista hallintaa se alentaisi yhteiskunnan anarkian tilaan”. Luento on julkaistu suomennettuna otsikolla ”Hierarkia, tasa-arvo ja anarkian sublimaatio: länsimainen illuusio ihmisluonnosta” Suomen Antropologi -lehdessä 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)
Ernst 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) Julkaistu Suomen Antropologin numerossa 1/2008
(2) Julkaistu Suomen Antropologin numerossa 4/2005
(3) Julkaistu Suomen Antropologin numerossa 1/2004
(4) Julkaistu Suomen Antropologin numerossa 2/2002
(5) Julkaistu Suomen Antropologin numerossa 1/2000
(6) Julkaistu teoksessa Developing Anthropological Ideas: The Edward Westermarck Memorial Lectures 1983-1997 (Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society 41;
Helsinki, 1998)