SEMANT2022: Writing Individual Existence Ryerson University Toronto, Canada, May 10-13, 2022 |
Conference website | https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1aixNUS0Qo07QWFa1bes43_2c1hR9_FOOLXg5Kpjc3Ys/edit |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semant2021 |
Abstract registration deadline | February 23, 2022 |
Submission deadline | March 5, 2022 |
Writing Individual Existence
Ryerson University
Toronto, May 2022
Writing about humans is the central task of anthropology, writing about human sign systems is the central task of semiotics. Both fields have developed methods and functions to capture the systematic aspects of human activity and to represent them in writing.
In any research on human beings, the researcher encounters specific human beings that take shape as individuals in ways that are distinct from other members of the same species. Yet, while these members share a certain form of existence, each human being’s genetic material, life-path, set of social relations, and modes of consciousness also translate into individual forms of existence.
What makes human existence, however, particularly ripe for myriad events of reproduction is the ability to engage with the world and with others through the mediating factor of the mind and the versatile use of symbolic systems. As a corollary of this, the use of symbolic communication and other sign systems is also individualized.
Sociology, anthropology and semiotics have, however, strived to understand the whole of a society, a culture or symbolic system, while much of psychology has focussed on the shared interior aspects of humans, all disciplines generalising human behaviour across individuals. An individual serving to provide clues on the collective within the purview of these generalising approaches has given rise to many insights about behaviour that is shared among the members of a group. Nevertheless, the individual, their ongoing lives and everyday practices, in their malleable forms and shapes, have nevertheless not been proven to be reducible to common patterns. We may thus wonder whether, through the study of everyone, we may have forgotten the individual, or, at the very least, may not have paid necessary attention to individual existence as it finds expression in individual behaviour and everyday practice.
The observation of the irreducibility of the individual, made the individual resurface in the history of anthropology time and again, from Kluckhohn and Murray (1948) to Nadel (1951) to Reyna (2002) without, however, having been taken up and turned into a subject of discussion. In recent years, the idea to study the individual and to clarify its status within anthropology has slowly gained impetus. Writers like Michael Jackson (2005) apply ideas from existential philosophy to their writings and authors like Nigel Rapport (1997) and Albert Piette (2017) openly raise the question about how we should conceive the individual and research it. At the same time, the question of the individual within anthropology and semiotics can find inspiration from neighbouring disciplines, from sociological writers like Georg Simmel (1917) who conceives society as a product of individual interaction to Goffman (1981) whose writings reflect a sense of individuality or philosophers like de Certeau (1984) or Merleau Ponty ([1995] 1945) who scrutinize the subjective perspective on the world and oneself. But in the humanities and social sciences, in order to convey the data and the truths sought out by inquiry and observation, the individual experience needs to be written to be shared broadly. Furthermore, in ethnographic accounts of the other, the individual, standing to serve as an exemplum for a whole, is a critical lens through which one can clearly examine the practice of writing human existence. As such, the observation of the construction of individuals through the process of another’s acts of writing can become more apparent. It is therefore of dire importance that the practice of writing individual existence be considered via methodology, practice, approach, and finally, through the production of texts.
Following previous meetings in Limoges and Zurich, that centered on the theoretical conceptualization of individual existence, we would thus like to focus on the practice of writing on individuals and their existence.
In order to turn our anthropological and semiotic attention towards the individual as she/he is written, we propose a two-day colloquium to bring together Anthropologists and Semioticians from around the world to consider the importance of the act of writing individual existence and to discuss the practices of writing. As individuals are often responsible for writing the very experiences that make up the fabric through which we understand species-specific existence, we propose to bring together a group of experts to discuss the role of writing (and any other form of engraving into experience the existence of the individual) to survey and propose good practices for ensuring the continued rigor and methodological soundness that are faithful to observational data and the field-subjects’ subjective perspectives alike while engaging in theoretical work.It is our objective to clarify the nature and role of writing in this context. Possible questions: How best to represent individual existence? How to control bias in writing? How to represent and reproduce the process of understanding individuals? How is the individual “transformed” or moulded or shaped or distorted or discovered or created in the writing process? How does the anticipation of the writing process mould the interactions with the individuals and our observations right from the beginning? How to represent the limits of understanding individuals? How to describe the ever-shifting nature of individuals? Are there models from literary studies to find answers to these questions? How are knowledge about individuals and knowledge about the shared features of the species intertwined in the writing process? Perceiving writing on individuals as encounters between individual writers and field-subjects, in how far is the process of writing mediated through a writer’s individuality? What would the status of auto-ethnography as a process of an individual reflecting back upon itself be in this context?
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The organizing committee is inviting participants to a 2-day colloquium in Toronto, Ontario, in May of 2022. Ryerson University’s modern and inviting spaces will host the group. The City of Toronto will be the backdrop to this conference that seeks to energize the conversation about human existence via the multicultural diversity of its inhabitants and their cultures, but also by drawing on the excellence in both anthropologists and semioticians of the city and its environs.
The conference committee invites the submission of abstracts (250 words with title and bibliography) by February 1st, 2022. Details for the submission of abstracts will be soon available.
Proposals can include the following themes:
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Autoethnography
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Practice of ethnography
- Writing individual existence in field work
- From individual to group and back again
- Biological Anthropology and the individual experience
- Semiotics of individuality
- Ethics of treating the individual
- Withholding information and anonymity in writing individual existence
- Signs and identity: the practice and validity of using individuals as examples
- Etc.
Resource Development:
The purpose of the colloquium is to expand the proposed methods and best practices, as heard over the two-day event, and from the conversations and presentations, to work on preparing a comprehensive field-guide for Anthropologists, Semioticians, and Sociologists, eager to engage with the question of Writing Individual Existence.
The Field Guide will be a practical as well as referential workbook for graduate students engaging in the practice of ethnography or human participant observations more broadly.
RESOURCES:
de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press: Berkeley.
Fávero, M. H. (2007). Semiotic mediation, psychological development process and social representations: towards a theoretical and methodological integration. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v3i1.392
https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/392/html
Goffman, Erving (1981) Footing. In: Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 124-157.
Jackson, M. (2005) Existential Anthropology. Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York, Oxford: Berghahn.
Kluckhohn, C. & Murray, H. (1948) Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ([1995] 1945) Phénomenologie de la perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Nadel, S.F. (1951) Foundations of Social Anthropology. London: Cohen and West.
Piette, A. (2019) Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being, London, Wiley-Iste.
Rapport, N. (1997) Transcendent Individual. London and New York: Routledge.
Reyna, S.P. (2002) Connections: Brain, Mind, and Culture in a Social Anthropology. New York: Routledge.
Simmel, G. (1999 [1917]) Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und Gesellschaft). In Simmel, G., Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen, Gesamtausgabe, Volume 16, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp: 59-149.