Portal Confluence - Pirate trans-fluence

The pirate shares with the shaman and the madman a position of the impossibility of society and the discrepancy and discontinuity of culture. This line of argument to subvert the stable yet imaginary conception of society as total and culture as homogenous was shared between pioneer anthropologists Levi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, the work of the latter of which had informed this session’s point of departure of the observation that all cultures take pride in offering food to strangers in rituals of hospitality. The pirate, in this sense, not only marks the position of the limit of sovereign hierarchy and juridical control, but also is the one that reciprocates between those who offers, receives and returns, which is the gift economy that gives rise to cultures, as Mauss proposes. The imperative of exchange is that which sustains relations to others by accepting what Mark Cousins observes which are how ‘”history” and the contiguity of other cultures continuously erode any promise of a completed symbolism. Societies wander in and out of each other scattering nonsense in their wake. Discrepancy and discontinuity are the conditions of the concept of culture, not deductions from it.’ Here we return to Michel Foucault’s warning of the eradication of the heterotopic terrain through the reductive ideal of utopia by resorting to figure of the pirate who embodies the last possibility of culture as trans-fluence: ‘In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.’

Watch online here.

SCHEDULE

5:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath, Ke Bo Izac Tsai and Shiyu Jin

5:15pm - Lecture by Prof. Stephan Feuchtwang: Civilisation and Humanity

6:15pm break

6:30pm - Roundtable with all presenters and guest discussants Kent Deng, Shin Egashira, Javier Castanon, Chia-Yu Liang, Teresa Stoppani and Stuart Thompson

Pirate trans-fluence is the third of the three seminar sessions on the theme of Portal Confluence, which is the third episode of the PhD seminar series Interjectures 2022-23. The ‘Portal Confluence’ episode will be co-convened by Doreen Bernath, Ke Bo Izac Tsai and Shiyu Jin. Each session engages presentations by guest speakers, followed by comments and discussions, and is open to participants from the PhD and graduate school programmes, as well as open to the larger AA school and community.

Roundtable Guests:

Kent Deng is Professor of Economic History at The London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests and writing includes the rise of the literati in the economic life of pre-modern China; the maritime economic history of pre-modern China; the economic role of the Chinese peasantry. His recent book, co-authored with Yazhuo Zheng, is entitled State Failure and Distorted Urbanisation in Post-Mao's China, 1993–2012, and he has published widely on key topics from the developmental deadlock of the Chinese premodern economy; long-term demography of premodern China; early modern railway development in China; Chinese fiscal state and its impact on the economy.

Shin Egashira makes art and architecture collaboratively worldwide. His experiments include the construction of Alfred Jarry’s Time Machine alongside astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe; How to Walk a Flat Elephant and Twisting Concrete which fuse old and new technologies. He conducts a series of landscape workshops in rural and inner-city communities across the world. He is Unit Master of Diploma 11 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where he has been critically documenting neoliberal urban development in London. Shin holds visiting professorships at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and the University of Hong Kong.

Javier Castanon is Head of Environmental and Technical Studies Programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He has degrees from Manchester (BArch) Architectural Association (AA Dip) and Universidad de Granada, Spain (PhD) and has taught at the AA since 1978 and in other schools in the AA and abroad. He is a practicing architect in private practice as director of Castanon Associates (London) and Castañón Asociados (Madrid). His research interests lie with reinforced ceramics, light weight structures, folding and retractable structures, alternative materials and sustainability.

Teresa Stoppani is Professor of Architecture and Director of Architecture and Interior Design at Norwich University of the Arts. An architect and architectural theorist, Teresa studied Architecture at the IUAV University of Venice and received a PhD in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Florence. She has taught at the IUAV, the University of Greenwich, UT Sydney, and Leeds Beckett University where she was the Head of the School of Architecture. She is a member of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) Steering Group, an editor of the RIBA’s Journal of Architecture, and co-founder of the international research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, for which she has co-edited the book This Thing Called Theory. Her work focuses on the relationship between architecture theory and the design process, and on the influence of other spatial and critical practices on the specifically architectural.

Stuart Thompson lectured in Chinese Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is affiliated to the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies and LSE Taiwan Research Centre, for which he continues to act regularly as Chair and Discussant for seminars and conferences. His research traverse contexts of Taiwan, Southern China, and Ireland on topics of food and culture, anthropology of education, death rites, cultural literacy, schooling, language, history and ritual, trauma, memories and identities, insular cinemas and literary metaphors. His publications include co-editing and contributing to: Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson & Jakob Klein (eds.) Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China, (Routledge, 2016); and Fang-Long Shih, Stuart Thompson & Paul-Francois Tremlett (eds.) 2009 Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan, Routledge.

Chia-Yu Liang is a Doctoral student in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex, where he is currently conducting his doctoral research on ‘The Politics of the Return of Tianxia in Modern China’. He has published in the journal Political Theology and the British Journal of Chinese Studies. Beyond academia, he has participated in the movement of ‘Public Understanding of Philosophy’ in Taiwan, and translated several books on Political Philosophy, including the first translation of Simone Weil’s work in Taiwan.

Lecture by Stephan Feuchtwang

Civilisation and Humanity

With my close colleague Mike Rowlands and prompted by our joint workshops on civilisation in China with our friend Wang Mingming, I have co-written Civilisation Recast (Cambridge University Press, 2012). The book reformulates ‘civilisation’ making it a concept for anthropologists and other social scientists that can be used without falling into the danger of Eurocentrism or any other cultural and imperial centrism. We followed the great pioneer anthropologist Marcel Mauss in posing it as a counterweight to the cultural nationalisms of European states and their global spread. Our starting point is the anthropological observation that all cultures take pride in offering food to strangers in rituals of hospitality. In doing so strangers are recognised as fellow humans though they are beyond the cultural community of their hosts and might be trading, marriage or warring rivals. As David Graeber and Wengrow drew so well to our attention, the history of humanity has been one of migration and increasing ranges of associations of interaction. This has led to both cultural self-differentiation and observations of similarities between communities and the partnerships their widely spread relationships have afforded. Civilisation Recast posits cultures as self-centring and self-differentiating from other cultures that are similar in their civilisation. We define ‘civilisation’ as the sharing of an encompassing sense of the world of life-making and of past lives, including what is and what is not human. My talk will elaborate on all this and draw our conclusion that civilisations are themselves spreads and mixes.

Stephan Feuchtwang is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Anthropology. He has been engaged in research on popular religion and politics in mainland China and Taiwan since 1966, resulting in a number of publications on charisma, place, temples and festivals, and civil society. He has also been engaged in a comparative project exploring the theme of the recognition of catastrophic loss, including the loss of archive and recall, which in Chinese cosmology and possibly elsewhere is pre-figured in the category of ghosts. His wide-ranging publications include: China In Comparative Perspective, with Hans Steinmüller (2017); The Anthropology of China: China as Ethnographic and Theoretical Critique, with Charlotte Bruckermann (2016); Recollections: Eva Neurath, 1908-1999 (2016). Most recently he has been pursuing a project on the comparison of civilisations and empires, cumulating in the publication with Michael Rowlands entitled Civilisation Recast: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives (2019).