Social Anthropology Seminar - Dr Paolo Heywood - University of Cambridge
| Dates: | 4 December 2017 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Dr Paolo Heywood |
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Social Anthropology Seminar
Monday, 4th December 2017
Dr Paolo Heywood – University of Cambridge
‘“All the difference in the world”: the nature of difference and different natures’.
This paper examines the status of ‘difference’ in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism – along with theoretical movements it has partly inspired – emphasises this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This paper experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radically resembling Euro-American thought in its conceptualisation of the nature of difference, i.e. the form that difference takes as a relation. It argues that in schematic representations of Amerindian and Euro-American cosmologies, difference for both is always a matter of institution and construction, and resemblance is a matter of essence and necessity. Thus, paradoxically, arguments about radical difference may in fact be read to assert an underlying essentialism as to the nature of difference itself. I conclude by proposing that we abandon conceptions of the nature of difference, in favour of a focus on ‘styles’ of difference.
2.016/.017
Second Floor Boardroom, Arthur Lewis Building
4:15 – 6:00pm
(Tea and coffee available outside the room from 4:00pm)
ALL WELCOME!
Speaker
Dr Paolo Heywood
Role: Speaker
Organisation: university of Cambridge
Travel and Contact Information
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2nd floor boardroom - 2.016 /017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
