Finnish Anthropology Conference 2013: Culture, creativity and performativity 16th -17th of May 2013

In popular thought, a distinction is often made between culture as the way of life and culture as art. In this frame, art is seen as the site of creativity and innovation whereas culture as a way of life is understood in terms of tradition and repetition. Despite the fact that anthropology has a productive history of researching culture as a way of life and there is anthropology of art as well, culture as art has usually been understood as a subject matter for historians, literary scholars and musicologists.

The anthropological discussion on the concept of culture has, however, questioned this distinction. In current discussions, tensions between improvisation and tradition are understood to characterize all cultural agency. The improvisatory nature and creativity underlying all human action is a continuous focus of theoretical discussion and empirical analysis. On the other hand, art is also seen as a socially embedded activity, entailing negotiation, struggle and manipulation. Various artistic forms have, however, their own idiosyncratic languages for producing meaning. Research has analyzed the ways in which these languages are connected with the practices of every-day life. Anthropology of art has pointed out the Euro-centricity of the very concept of art and analyzed artistic production as socially embedded action. Through the concept of performativity, rituals and performance practices have been analyzed, as well as connections between the body, landscape and memory, and production of gender and other social distinctions.

The Finnish Anthropology Conference 2013 looks at the multiple dimensions of creativity and performativity, as well as at their global connections. We invite participants to focus on the creative, expressive and improvisatory aspects of everyday life on the one hand, and on the social embeddedness of all expressive forms on the other. Also rituals, the connections between memory, landscape and the body as well as performativity as consequential action, among others, are welcome themes.

The keynote speakers are:

• Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, UK
• Steven Feld, University of New Mexico, USA
• Jocelyne Guilbault, University of California Berkeley, USA.

For further inquiries, contact conference secretary Saara Kristiansson (saara.kristiansson@uta.fi).

Organizers: The Finnish Anthropological Society, The Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology and the anthropologists and musicologists at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere