Conference: South-South II: Materiality and Embodiment in Greater Asia and Africa (October 27-28, 2017, Columbia University, New York)

Keynote Speakers: Projit Mukharji (Associate Professor of History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania) and Nina Sylvanus (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Northeastern University)

The incorporation of non-humans as active participants in knowledge production has prepared the way for interrogations of the nature of "objects," "bodies," and their relationship to one another throughout history. Transregional studies of objects and bodies have often focused on narratives of circulation and migration. But how does an inclusion of an object or body's embeddedness in certain geographies and temporal contexts enable new possibilities for research? Does a study of material culture, theorized through conceptions of objects and bodies, confound or confirm regional geographies? This conference seeks to give voice to histories of materiality and embodiment in the Global South, in particular in Africa and Greater Asia broadly defined.

This conference thus poses two primary questions. First, how can African and Asian concepts and archives be used to reframe discourses on materiality and embodiment in the Global South? Second, what new optics of research do historical and historiographical questions about materiality and embodiment within the geographies of Greater Asia and Africa enable? Between these framing questions, many more emerge: how does the study of material culture intersect with processes of both circulation and embeddedness? How do materials themselves structure political economies? What are the ways, if any, of recovering histories of materials without the histories of humans? What purposes do materials serve in therapeutics, and how do they shape wellbeing – whether biomedical, physiological, psychological, political, religious, or otherwise? Where does the line between human and material blur, and in what ways can materiality be understood as an extension of embodiment or personhood?

This two-day conference will take place on October 27th and 28th at Columbia University in New York.

Click here for information about last year's South-South conference, "Intellectual History across Middle East and South Asia, 1857-1948."