Event Friday - Things That Come and Go: Ephemera and Atmospherics in Times of Crisis
Friday, April 18 at 4pm
Hale 230
Professor Patricia Spyer will offer the Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology for the 2024-25 academic year. Her lecture will address the intersection of aesthetics, appearances, and the rise of public visual culture in Eastern Indonesia. Her recent book Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia, on Christian public art in Ambon, has been well received. Her new research, funded by a Swiss National Sciences Fund grant, expands that visual cultural research to other areas of Indonesia鈥擝anda, Bali, Ternate, and Tidore. By expanding regionally, the project also emphasizes interconnection and circulation: of images, ideas, and commodities, as well as historical spans.
Notwithstanding the anthropological commitment to understanding everyday life in all its diversity, from banal to extraordinary circumstances, the discipline has tended to shy away from difficult to grasp if palpable phenomena like ambiance, climate, and atmospherics. Drawing on examples from her book, Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia聽(Fordham 2022), She will explore how fugitive forces and forms suffused and oriented the actions and experiences of wartime, from Karl von Klausewitz鈥檚 鈥渇og of war鈥 to huge Christian billboards and murals that sprung up in the Muslim-Christian conflict in Ambon, Indonesia in the early 2000s. Such elusive, ephemeral aspects of social life鈥攆rom street art to invisible if palpable atmospherics deserve our acute attention. For even as they come and go, such phenomena can have a lasting impact. Depositing their traces in an assortment of practices and forms they bring about novel formations of sociality and the sensible, altered landscapes of living and cohabitation, and subtly different ways of seeing, dwelling, and engaging the world.
Patricia Spyer is a faculty member in Anthropology at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.
鈥嬧嬧嬧嬧嬧嬧婽his event is funded in part by a grant by the Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education.