Public Evening Lecture

Wednesday, 01 February 2023 | 06.00 pm | Lecture Hall S 01 (new seminar building (NSG), main campus)

DANCES WITH CATEGORIES:
TOWARDS THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF “TECHNOLOGY”, TECHNICITY AND TECHNODIVERSITY
with Ludovic Coupaye 

(University College London)

This lecture explores how “Technology” is a category vernacular (emic) to modernity which, when used, inscribes the phenomena it refers to within an utilitarian, rationalist and Eurocentric frame. Building on the works of the Francophone Technologie Culturelle, the paper suggests going back to Marcel Mauss’s definition of “technical acts”, focalising on the issue of efficacy. The paper claims that it is by taking seriously the efficacy according to the actors – be they computer engineers, long yam growers or shamans – that one can built a methodological frame able to empirically analyse technical (or ritual or aesthetic) phenomena, and their profound axiological import, without sacrificing their material or conceptual diversity, or their spatial or temporal complexity. It opens up with a call for an anthropology of technicity and technodiversity which analyse the different modalities of actions and relations between humans and their milieus.

The lecture will be followed by the CMC Master Class open for undergraduate and graduate students

Thursday, 02 February 2023, at 5.45 pm S23 (NSG, new seminar building)        

For registration and further information please contact PD Dr. Cora Bender (info-memouni-koeln.de)