Upcoming Event: June 26

IPA Workshop on the Beauty of the City

Our upcoming workshop will deal with the question of the Beauty of the City that concerns the ideal nature of a city that may encompass the noble qualities of city life. This theme will also investigate the manners in which city life is realised through the caring of their dwellers. Several attempts to develop ideal city plans are known from the Renaissance, and appear from the second half of the fifteenth century in urban structures, including building plans and street layout. The concept dates from at least the time of Plato, whose Republic is a philosophical exploration on the notion of the 'ideal city', built on a politics of friendship. The Renaissance, in its noble attempt to imitate the qualities of Classical civilisation, sometimes sought to construct such ideal cities, either in reality or notionally through a reformation of manners and culture. The workshop will elaborate the question whether the search for beauty in the combined natural and cultural environment that the city represents could be a manner of solving the contemporary impasse of consumerism and rationalism. The beauty of the human environment is an equally shared and not consumed good, and thus, it might be the case that the search for beauty could be the model for modern culture.

--- Convener: Agnes Horvath, Bjorn Thomassen Coordinator: Daniel Gati, +39 393 264 3539

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Upcoming Event: July

IPA Argonautica

St Jean Pied-de-Port (France) - Finisterre (Spain)

This is a call from the IPA to walk through a part of Europe, South of France and North-West of Spain, during July 2011.

The Greek myth of the Argonautica tells the story of the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the mythical land of Colchis. Another voyage, destined to be less well known, will be ours: we shall set out from St Jean Pied-de-Port in southern France and walk to Finisterre in north-western Spain. The journey will take place in the month of July. We will cover a distance of 820km. We envisage 20-25 kms of walking per day. On the first day, we intend to make the steep 1200m climb to St Jean. It is possible to reach St Jean Pied-de-Port by train. Ryanair flies to Biarritz, and the airport bus goes to Bayonne station, from where a branch line train (with up to six departures per day scheduled in the summer) heads for St Jean. There is a similarly straightforward route back from Finisterre (Santiago de Compostela) to Biarritz (see, for instance, www.amawalker.blogspot.com ). But of course it is possible to use one-way tickets with Ryanair, and leave Spain by plane.

The wayfarers International Political Anthropology are enacting this 820 km long walk from the Basque village St Jean Pied-de-Port to Finisterre in order to retrieve the conditions and potentials of reality, away from the unreal land of the contemporary.

Please, let us know if you would like to join to us. The Editors of the International Political Anthropology More Details in pdf

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Past Event: February 2011

The Anthropology of Corruption as Forgery

International Political Anthropology Conference University College Cork, Ireland, 11-12 February, 2011

The conference aims at bringing together scholars from the broad area of the social sciences and the humanities, including but not restricted to anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political science, art history and archaeology, and focuses on the theme of integrity, corruptness, and forgery. It will reflect on the growing problem posed by forgery or the falsification of one’s own character, which then shapes one’s attitudes, opinions, and perspectives on the world. Forgery, understood in this sense, undermines personal integrity, as it alters values by reordering and rearranging them, evacuating their meaning, given that the copy stands indiscriminately for anything and for everything, and eventually offering a corrupted version as the model to be imitated by others. The distinction between the original and the copy was central for Plato’s anthropological philosophy, thus underlining the need to re-connect classical and modern social and political thinking, in particular anthropological philosophy and social and cultural anthropology. The conference will focus in particular on the political anthropological aspects of forgery: its multiplicative and regressive character, the manner in which it contributes to the steady, almost irreversible, though unintended decomposition of the political body, eroding its meaning and substance, destroying its wholeness and shape. In this sense forgery implies cumulative errors in social learning (Jack Goody, Gregory Bateson, René Girard); forgery is corruption in the sense of changing the meaning of social interactions (Michael Herzfeld, Hastings Donnan); forgery means trickery and double thinking at every level of society (Paul Radin, Lewis Hyde, Carl Kerényi, Richard Sakwa, Elemér Hankiss). Contact person: Dr. Agnes Horvath, Chief Editor, International Political Anthropology: ipa.amf (at) gmail.com. Please, send in abstracts no longer than 300 words. Deadline: January 28th, 2011. Sign Up for the Event