Dear colleagues,
from 14th through 17th September 2011 this year's installment of the
biannual conference of the German Association of Anthropologists (GAA
aka DGV) will take place in Vienna, Austria. Since 2005 I organize
workshops on 'things cyber' at the GAA conferences, this time a
workshop titled 'Cyberculture,' in accordance with the conference's
overall theme: 'Wa(h)re "Kultur"? Kulturelles Erbe, Revitalisierung
und die Renaissance der Idee von Kultur' ('True/commodity "culture?"
Cultural heritage, revitalization, and the renaissance of the idea of
culture'). As of today the conference website isn't up yet, only
a .pdf with the collected Calls for Papers. As I have invited two
guests from English-speaking countries the workshop will be held in
English. The abstract of the workshop you'll find below. In the
workshops I organize every presenter gets a slot of 40 minutes
alloted. 20 minutes for the presentation, and 20 minutes for q&a and
discussion. Of course it is no problem, if the presenter needs a bit
more than 20 minutes. That way we do not run into the awkward
situation of having to pull a presenter off the dais by force.
Website of the DGV/GAA:
http://www.dgv-net.de/english.html
DGV/GAA 2011 collected Calls for Papers:
http://www.dgv-net.de/tl_files/dokumente/Call_for_Papers.pdf
That said I hereby would like to invite everybody interested in
presenting at the workshop to send me a proposal. Proposals must
comprise no more than 150 words, and have to be sent before 11 March
2011 to me via e-mail: (alexander.knorr /at/ lmu.de) The proposals should be
submitted in English, likewise the presentations at the workshop will
be held in English.
Best,
Alexander Knorr
Cyberculture
During the early 1960s 'cyberculture' was created as a political
fighting word?supported by fear of the social consequences of the
proliferation of complex technology, which accelerated significantly
since the postwar period. 'Cyberculture' then meant the 'lifestyle' of
a society affected by cybernetics, the science of communication and
control in systems of whatever provenance. The terminus proofed to be
ephemeral and was forgotten during the 1970s, together with
cybernetics itself. Under the impression of modern technology's
influence on all aspects of life gaining ever more weight on a global
scale, anthropologist Arturo Escobar in 1994 sketched a new concept of
'cyberculture' and invited our whole profession to belabour the field.
But social and cultural anthropology to a certain degree neglected
'cyberculture,' just as the concept of 'culture.' Instead a multitude
of authors, among them so prominent ones like Pierre Lévy, coming from
a wide range of academic disciplines, appropriated the term
'cyberculture.' Thereby it suffered a bit of an inflation, became a
buzzword. But more than ever an anthropological perspective appears
promising, which has as its central focus the interrelationships
between humans and complex technology. This is because the manifold
manifestations of digital electronics and state-of-the-art technology
in general decisively co-define our contemporary world. Around the
globe these technologies have become parameters of human existence,
have become aspects of the ideas and designs of how to cope with this
existence, and even of the idea of human itself. A lot of which still
has been Science Fiction not too long ago has become
Lebenswirklichkeit: Individuals who never meet face-to-face not only
collaborate, but are forming friendships lasting
a lifetime? interacting via a plethora of
Internet services they create new forms
of community and society. At the polar circle Inuit precisely find
their ways through night and ice by balancing satellite-data with
patterns of snowdrift. In subsaharan Africa nearly nobody has a fixed
line network connection, but a lot of people possess more than one
cellphone. A South-African with legs of carbon-fibre runs the 400
metres so fast that he qualifies for the Olympics. In Japan elderly
people do no more want to miss the presence of androids and in the
Near East robots search suspects for explosives. Since about a decade
the number of anthropological studies belabouring such topics is
increasing, giving ample testimony of the fact, that our discipline
since long has arrived in the here and now, and that it may well be
more relevant than ever. Decidedly focussed on the presence,
perspectives which can be subsumed under 'cyberculture' promise to
generate knowledge and understanding in an anthropological sense. To
those perspectives the workshop is dedicated.
_________
PD Dr. Alexander Knorr
Akademischer Oberrat
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Institut für Ethnologie
Raum 274
Edmund-Rumpler-Straße 9
80939 München
Tel.: +49 89 2180 9624
Fax: +49 89 2180 9602
(alexander.knorr /at/ lmu.de)
http://xirdalium.net
