Place: Italy, Acquapendente 

Duration: 1 week, 21-27 June 2020


By pairing together political alchemy and the idea of creative destruction, the aim of the summer school is to revisit theoretically, in a comparative historical and anthropological framework, the problem of political alchemy, in light of the recent, all but completely unanticipated developments in politics, through the prism of the ideas of creative destruction, disruption, and permanent revolution, ideas now promoted by business schools, but originally coined by revolutionary avant-gardes. While being obsessed with equal rights, scrupulous attention to processes and policies, and the rule of law, we still seem desperately in need of destruction in order to go forward and progress.

However, by now it seems evident that the idea of moving forward through destruction only leads to the proliferation of the incommensurable, the flux and the void. Mainstream and critical social and political sciences, caught in between rigid institutionalism and obsession with revolutionary change, schismogenic doubles, are incapable of understanding the processes that are being increasingly unleashed upon all of us, entailing the destruction of meaning, even the destruction of nature.

Something fundamental is missing at the level of basic concepts, and the aim of this summer school is to offer a perspective from political anthropology, using terms like liminality, imitation, schismogenesis, the spiral and the ‘trickster’, but also gift relations and participation, that could tackle the transformations generated by political alchemy that evidently fall outside the scope of modern critical rationality.

Course leader: Dr Agnes Horvath, founding and chief editor, IPA 
Target group: PhD students in the fields of Sociology, Anthropology, Politics and International Relations, Philosophy, History, or other cognate disciplines. In some cases we also accept Master students, upon successful application. 

Credits info: 5 for attendance, 10 credits if also finishing a 5.000 words paper 
Fee info: Following even in this sense the spirit of Plato’s Academy, the philosophy of this summer school is to minimize the involvement of the circularity of money in academic life. Thus, the Summer School will only have a small registration fee (€45, not refundable), above the membership fee, 25 euro/year. The School will be self-supporting for meals and drinks, with a donation for accommodation. The donation for the accommodation is made directly to the hosts and it depends on you only with a minimum of 10 euros per day to a maximum of 20. Food and drinks can be estimated at 10 euros per day including breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

To apply for the IPA summer school (IPASS) in Casa di Lazaro, Acquapendente, please send us the following by the 15th of May 2020:

- A letter of recommendation from your supervisor

- A letter of interest

- Your recent CV

Please send your application and the attachments to:

ipass (at) politicalanthropology.org