CRASSH

Public Keynote Lecture

Conference Summary

This two-day conference on institutions and institutional change in South Asia brings together historians, economic historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists to critically discuss and debate institutional development in the region. With panels ranging from the origins of institutions in the region to contemporary attempts at policy reform to the informal economy and innovation, the conference includes contributions from eminent scholars and emerging researchers.

The primacy accorded to institutions in literature on economic development by eminent scholars like Dani Rodrik and Daron Acemoglu has been challenged by academics like Ha-joon Chang, but the debate has remained closeted among economists. This conference aims to enrich and expand the dialogue by engaging experts from other disciplines like history and politics to contextualise the emergence of institutions in their historical and socio-political context. The geographical focus on South Asia will enable the discussion to be grounded and targeted at understanding one of the poorest regions of the world, often castigated for its weak and corrupt institutions. The diversity in the fortunes of India and other regional players like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, will allow a critical appreciation of other factors helping or hindering economic growth with or without strong institutions.

Mary Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, will give a lecture as part of the CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor programme.

This lecture explores some of the challenges of moving from a lifelong research project centred in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature to a project focused on modern economics and finance, mostly in the United States. Mary Poovey will discuss the argument of the book she and Kevin R Brine are completing, A Modern Way of Knowing: Studies in the History of Financial Modeling, and she will examine the risks and rewards of this intellectual swerve.

All medical fields have their cultures, both among professionals and in the wider world. Such cultures tend to be metaphorically rich. By that token surgery has been associated with, variously, butchery, cutting open, delving inside, mutilation, penetration and so on. We can see these features in satires, which for several centuries have developed a critical language, visual as well as verbal, for speaking about the aspects of surgery that perhaps seem most frightening to outsiders, and that may sometimes be embraced by insiders in developing a collective identity. Feminist commentators and artists have been particularly alert to the gender issues embedded in medical cultures generally, and surgical cultures specifically. I was first working on these themes in the 1980s, but since then a good deal has changed. One of the most striking shifts is the rise of elective surgery, which covers a wide range of phenomena, but in all cases is capable of shedding light on the ways people think about, represent and spend money on their bodies. Another is the interest in disability. My current interest is primarily in visual representation. So I also can’t help but observe how persistent religious motifs are in the representation of pain, suffering and bodily mutilation. My talk will consider a range of artistic representations of bodies in the context of surgery, for example, by Barbara Hepworth in the 1940s and John Bellany in the 1980s, and explore how we might use them to think about broader historical and political issues. Surgeons’ relationships with human bodies have been contentious for a long time; visual culture offers rich opportunities for exploring the complexities involved.

Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of History and Visual Culture at the University of Durham. She has held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Essex, York, East Anglia and at King’s College, London. Her training was in the natural sciences, history and philosophy of science and art history. She has long worked on aspects of medicine, and she seeks to blend history and art history while doing so. A Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery between 2001 and 2009, she is currently a Trustee of the Science Museum group. The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice came out in 2012; she is currently preparing the third edition of History in Practice and writing a book about ‘medical’ portraits to be called Traces of Life.

Dame Margaret Anstee en conversación con Almudena de la Cueva y Alison Sinclair, como colofón a la Conferencia y Simposio MacColl, "Recordando a JB Trend: el discreto internacionalista," Universidad de Cambridge, 2013.

Dame Margaret Anstee in conversation with Alison Sinclair and Karen Arrandale.

Mellon CDI-invited Fellow

Cornel West

Cornel West, one of America’s most celebrated and provocative public intellectuals, in conversation with Ben Okri (novelist) and respondent Malachi McIntosh (University of Cambridge) on Literature and the Nation.

The French Embassy has generously sponsored a cycle of lectures and workshops which bring to Cambridge leading scholars from France to interact and foster research collaborations with experts in Cambridge from across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences. In this second year of collaboration, the cycle of talks and workshops will explore the complex theme of identity in 21st-century France and beyond.

The lectures, which will be given in English, are open to any member of the University.

In this fourth lecture, co-organised by the Department of French, Professor Vincent Descombes (L'École des Hautes Études on Sciences Sociales) will give a talk on Criteria for Collective Identities.

The lecture will address the question whether there is any connection between two concepts of identity: the logical concept on the one hand, i.e. 'identity' as we understand it when we make an assertion of identity ('the Morning Star = the Evening star'), and the psychological concept on the other hand, i.e. the kind of identity we have in mind when we are speaking of an 'identity crisis' or putting forward a programme of 'identity politics'.

Firstly, Professor Descombes will consider whether there are identity criteria for collective entities such as cities, schools, churches, countries, etc. This is basically a question about the ontological status of instituted groups. Secondly, he will ask who is in a position to define the criteria to be applied to a group in order to make judgments as to its identity over time. This is a question about the idea of a collective consciousness and a moral psychology of people in groups. Can a group entertain a self-definition like an individual person? Having such a power is what it takes to have an identity in the psychological sense. He will attempt to make sense of such an ascription of a psychological identity to groups by spelling out the semantics of the pronoun 'we'.

About Vincent Descombes

Born in 1943, Vincent Descombes is a French philosopher, based at the Centre de Recherches Politiques Raymond Aron, which is part of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. His Le Même et l’Autre (1979) (translated asModern French Philosophy) provided an important critical account of French philosophy from 1933 to 1978. His subsequent work has engaged with the analytic tradition. Although he has a wide range of interests, he is particularly interested in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of action. Among his many works may be cited: Grammaire d'objets en tous genres, Éditions de Minuit, 1983 (Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Proust: philosophie du roman, Éditions de Minuit, 1987 (Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, Stanford University Press, 1992); Philosophie par gros temps, Éditions de Minuit, 1989 (The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events, Oxford University Press, 1993); La Denrée mentale, Éditions de Minuit, 1995 (The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism, Princeton University Press, 2001); Les Institutions du sens, Éditions de Minuit, 1996; Le Complément de sujet, Gallimard, 2004; Philosophie du jugement politique, Paris, Points Essais, Seuil, 2008. His lecture will address the theme of identity, which he has explored in Les embarras de l'identité, Gallimard, 2013.

Judith Butler (Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley; Mellon CDI Visiting Fellow at CRASSH) gave the final lecture in CRASSH's Understanding Society series from her unique perspective of feminism, philosophy and language. In this conversation with Simon Goldhill, director of CRASSH, Professor Butler talks about academia, activism and Antigone.

Mellon CDI-invited Fellow

Cornel West

Cornel West, one of America’s most celebrated and provocative public intellectuals, in conversation with Mary Margaret McCabe (KCL) and respondent Constanze Güthenke (Princeton University) on Philosophy in the Public Sphere.

This is the second of two Leverhulme Re:Enlightenment Lectures by Clifford Siskin (Henry W and Alfred A Berg Professor of English and American Literature, New York University; Director, The Re:Enlightenment Project) who is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at CRASSH.

The video of the first lecture When System Met History: The Tectonics of the Modern Disciplines held on Tuesday 5 March 2013 is online here.

These lectures examine how knowledge gets stuck and the strategies for restarting it. Ranging from past to present--and back--they link Galileo's and Bacon’s efforts to advance knowledge to efforts to scale up to new possibilities today. The first lecture highlights the “good fortune” (Bacon) of new tools, by debuting one. Like Galileo's spyglass, "Tectonics" zooms in--in this case, to clarify how our modern disciplines emerged from Enlightenment. The second lecture zooms out to reconsider the history of science in terms of Newton choosing "system" as his tool for guesswork.

Together, these lectures explore the conditions of possibility for a centre such as CRASSH--a collaborative effort to reconnect the arts, social sciences and humanities. The first condition is the division of knowledge into those categories, with their second-order divisions into the narrow but deep disciplines of modernity. The second condition is that we think that there’s something to gain by this reconnect—that knowledge needs new forms of guesswork now. That thought—that we have a historically-specific opportunity for reorganizing and advancing knowledge—is also central to the The Re:Enlightenment Project's effort to explain and transform our Enlightenment inheritance. These lectures are not an effort to study Re:Enlightenment but to enact it.