The Mainz Symposia of Social- and Cultural Studies
Every two years, the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SOCUM) hosts an international conference with an innovative and interdisciplinary research topic of both social sciences and cultural sciences. The first Mainz Symposium, “Materialites. Challenges for the Social- and Cultural Studies” was held in 2011, with keynotes by Bill Brown (Chicago), Janet Hoskins (Los Angeles), Urs Stäheli (Hamburg) and Peter-Paul Verbeek (Enschede). The Georg Forster Lecture 2011 was given by Bruno Latour (Paris). In this year our international conference is organized in cooperation with the Research Unit “Historical Cultural Sciences” (HKW) at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz.
Symposium 2013: Practices and their bodies
The human body as the subject of research still sits very firmly in the grasp of the natural sciences. Nevertheless, cultural studies and social sciences have put forward two fundamental insights on the body vis-à-vis established biomedical knowledge. Firstly, both anthropological and phenomenological approaches have delved into the inner perspective of our inhabited bodies by viewing the ‘lived body’ as the foundation of all cognition and as the fundamental site of sensory perception, personality, and subjectivity. Secondly, ethnological and historical semantic studies have shed light on the extreme variability of ‘the body’ subject to societal knowledge regimes. Human bodies span an infinite plurality of cultural classifications and historical discourses – a bundle of linguistic categories, medical imaging, interpretation and explanation patterns. Our natural scientific knowledge of the body is part of historically and culturally specific ethnosemantics.
The 2nd Mainz Symposium of Social and Cultural Studies “Practices and their bodies. What kind of artefact is the lived body?” proposes a third fundamental sociocultural way of viewing the body, namely as a component of material culture. In recent years the term practices has oftentimes been used to express this perspective – a conception of human action and behaviour that places controlled bodily movement at the centre of social life. The conference aims to consolidate contributions of diverse disciplines (e.g., sociology, history, anthropology, cultural and media studies) in order to converge on possible answers to fundamental questions regarding a sociocultural view of the body. What kind of an artefact is the lived body? How many bodies does a human being have? Which language(s), images, and practices were and are used in pre-modern, modern, and post-modern times to evoke which bodies? What is the communication technological potential of bodies? How does the material body correspond to the perception of the lived body and of ‘mental’ activities? What are the variations that ‘marginal bodies’ bring to light: damaged, animal, dead, embryological, and engineered (cyborg) bodies?
Furthermore, cultural studies and social sciences face a number of methodical challenges: How is it possible to capture such a mute object as the body empirically? In which sign systems does it present itself: do bodies ‘speak’ their own language? Is it possible to access culturally different and historical bodies of the past? What kind of descriptive language can be developed that is independent of biomedical ethnosemantics? And finally, how can we deal with the idiosyncratic bias in light of the fleshy mass in between the ends of our hair and toes that we show a portion of the front side of to each other at conferences?