Connecting Materialities / Material Connectivities

International Symposium at the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), LMU Munich, 9–11 February 2017
Convened by
PHILIPP SCHORCH AND MARTIN SAXER
Call for Papers Deadline: 31 October 2016
This symposium aims at collectively thinking through connectivity and materiality. Our starting point is simple: things that move and thereby connect or, the other way round, connections made through things are central to anthropology’s concerns. From the Kula Ring to the journeys of museum objects, from the travels of empire-founding Buddha statues to the logics and logistics of shipping containers, connectivity and materiality are interwoven in various but particular ways. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we take connectivity and materiality not as defined properties of some-thing but as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or rather is becoming, in a world. Thus, with materiality we do not mean the materials as such, but the underlying forces and potentialities as material entity. Likewise, connectivity does not denote a single connection, but the underlying mode of being or becoming connected with other entities. The question is how these two ways of existence relate and fold into each other to produce the realities we attempt to understand.
The symposium sets out to trace histories, dissect theories, scrutinize methodologies and contextualize ethnographies from a variety of different settings, disciplinary backgrounds, and strands of thought. Working across the boundaries between anthropology, archaeology, art, curatorship, and material and visual culture studies, our objective is to bring these threads into dialogue in order to develop a conceptual frame – 2 –
through which connecting materialities / material connectivities can be approached, studied and understood as transcultural, transregional and global phenomena.
Programme
The symposium consists of a public keynote by Prof. Tim Ingold on February 9, 2017, followed by a two-day symposium with papers and artistic-academic interventions, such as arguments made through video and film installations or exhibitionary configurations, which provide an additional take on the topic and straddle the boundaries between academia and arts. These interventions are a result of the two preceding mat ~ con workshops that deployed curatorial techniques and spatial juxtapositions as research methodologies and material knowledge practices (see project webpage: http://www.highlandasia.net/projects/matcon.html).
Invited Speakers 
• Prof. Mark Aldenderfer, University of California Merced (USA)
• Prof. Inge Daniels, University of Oxford (UK)
• Prof. Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen (UK)
• Dr. Amiria Salmond, University of Auckland (New Zealand) and University of Cambridge (UK)
• Dr. Gilian Tan, Deakin University (Australia)
Call for Papers 
We invite paper submissions from scholars working across anthropology, archaeology, art, curatorship, material and visual culture studies, and related fields.
• Deadline for paper proposals: 31 October 2016
• Please send your proposal to: philipp.schorch@ethnologie.lmu.de
• Please include title, 250 words abstract, and affiliation
• Registration and catering during the symposium are covered by the organizers
• An edited volume with a major publisher will result from the symposium