Facing Gaia: A new enquiry into Natural Religion-Bruno Latour’s Gifford Lectures 2013

Bruno Latour’s recent (Feb,2013)  Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh deserve to be more widely viewed than they have been.  Indeed, if history is any guide, they probably will be, eventually.  Already I have heard about an upcoming workshop organized around the lecture series, and a book based on the series is forthcoming.  Past luminaries of these lectures, which were established to ‘promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term’ have included some of the most influential thinkers (and books) of the last century, including William James (1900-1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience), Henri Bergson (1913-14, The Problem of Personality), Hannah Arendt (1976, Life of the Mind), and, with particular significance for Latour, Alfred North Whitehead (1927-28, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology).

This last work, still notoriously troublesome despite its various revisions since Whitehead delivered it in Edinburgh almost a century ago, echoes throughout Latour’s six lectures.  Latour speaks; Whitehead stands at his shoulder.  It is clear that Professor Latour enjoyed following in ‘his philosopher’s’ footsteps. The key themes of the lectures circle around the implications of living in a new epoch in which humans are significantly affecting the earth’s ecosystem: the anthropocene.  The abstract for the series as a whole reads:

Facing Gaia. A New Inquiry into Natural Religion.

There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of ”natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ”natural religion”.

Politics, science and religion are brought into dialogue, via a sustained contemplation of Gaia, rather than nature.  What this shift calls for above all is a (political) shift from matters of fact to matters of concern, which is, in itself, a Whiteheadian shift.  The draft text of the lectures is available here (pdf), but the published book is on the way.  The remaining five lectures are below the fold.  I have only recently finished viewing them all and I am not ready to offer a critique just yet.  I may have to read (and re-read) the notes or the book that emerges to fully grasp what Latour is  saying.  His project is vast, and requires, demands, serious attention.  These lectures are a good place to begin.

The abstract for the first lecture is:

Once Out of Nature – natural religion as a pleonasm

Lecture abstract

The set of questions around the two words “natural religion” implies that only the second word is a coded and thus a disputed category, the first one being taken for granted and uncoded. But if it can be shown that the very notion of nature is a theological construct, we might be able to shift the problem somewhat: the question becomes not to save or resurrect “natural religion”, but to dispose of it by offering at last a ”secular” version of nature and of the natural sciences.

They get better as they go on.  Persevere.  And enjoy!

Sociology of the Video Gamer

Recently I have been thinking about video games.  I love gaming, and used to engage in it quite frequently prior to starting my PhD.  The last game I completed (on my laptop) was Batman: Arkham City and I have been occasionally dropping into Fall Out: New Vegas.  Occasionally.  As I lurch ever-closer to something like the end, I find my trigger fingers itching to play some of the more recent releases, like Bioshock Infinite, or future ones like the next Fall Out.

Anyway, the video above is effectively a ‘live book review’ of Garry Crawford‘s recent book Video Gamers (2011).  This promises to be a fascinating look at at the video gamer in context, from a sociological perspective, rather than from the more usual digital/games research perspectives that concentrate on things like player experience, HCI, and the tech involved in gaming.  Given the relative scarcity of good sociological work in this area, Crawford’s book is a welcome addition.  I have ordered it for later perusal.

Elias, I’m told, used to recommend that students and practitioners research topics or areas that they are genuinely interested in themselves-which is where Eliasian approach to the sociology of sport came from.  The field of digital games  may be an interesting site for future research for some of us, given the ‘gamification’ of so many aspects of contemporary life.

Some info from the Vimeo site is below.

Enjoy! JH

Think Design Play, 5th DiGRA conference
hosted by Utrecht School of the Arts

Video Gamers
Live Book Review of Video Gamers by Garry Crawford
(15 september 2011)

The field of games research has several different foci, one of them being the activity of game players. The new title, ‘Video Gamers’ by Garry Crawford (Published August 2nd 2011 by Routledge), claims to be “the first book to explicitly and comprehensively address how digital games are experienced and engaged with in the everyday lives, social networks, and consumer patterns of those who play them”. This Live Book Review is a keynote interview session by Frans Mäyrä, where Garry Crawford will be asked to introduce his book, the rationale behind this project, and how he intends this volume to contribute to the field of game studies.

Garry Crawford is a Cultural Sociologist at the University of Salford in the UK. His research and teaching focus primarily on audiences and consumers, and in particular, sport fans and video gamers. He has published numerous works, including the books: Video Gamers (2011), Online Gaming in Context(2011, edited with V.K. Gosling & B. Light), The Sage Dictionary of Leisure Studies (2009, with T. Blackshaw), Introducing Cultural Studies (2008, with B. Longhurst, G. Smith, G. Bagnall & M. Ogborn), and Consuming Sport(2004). His work on video gamers seeks to understand gaming culture away from the sight of a games machine, and consider video games within the complex flows and patterns of everyday life.

Frans Mäyrä is the Professor of Hypermedia, Digital Culture and Game Studies in the University of Tampere, Finland. He is the head of University of Tampere Game Research Lab, and has taught and studied digital culture and games from the early 1990s. His research interests include game cultures, meaning making through playful interaction, online social play, borderlines, identity, as well as transmedial fantasy and science fiction.

Conversations with History: Nancy Scheper-Hughes

[EDIT: Tried to link to clip so it begins 18mins in, where they begin to discuss Ireland, but it didn't work. You might want to skip to there yourself...]

In class with some second year undergraduate students of sociology & politics (NUI Galway) this morning we discussed qualitative research methods, particularly participant observation, ethnography, the issues surrounding access, and ethics.  During this discussion I mentioned the controversial work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and her book Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1979).  This was a study of madness among bachelor farmers on the Dingle Peninsula in West Kerry in the early 70′s.  The research is notable for many reasons, not least, the contrast in how the work was received by different audiences.  While Scheper-Hughes won the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1980, she was vilified in Ireland and in the local community in which she conducted her study most of all.  She discusses this in the interview above, and in paper in 2000, Ire in Ireland (paywall).  The ethical dilemma, she says, was best summed up by one of the townspeople of ‘Ballyban’ on her (short-lived) return in 1999, when he said:

‘It’s not your science I’m questioning but this: don’t we have the right to lead unexamined lives, to not be analyzed?  Don’t we have a right to hold on to an image of ourselves as “different” to be sure, but as innocent and unblemished all the same? (Scheper-Hughes, 2001, p.xvi).

The question we need to ask ourselves as social researchers is why; why are we doing this work; who benefits; is it worth it, in the end?  This a question of ethics, but it is more so a question of justification.  Is our intervention justified and what are the consequences of our work?  If, after all, we can make the case, on whatever grounds, for the value of what we do then may we invoke the right to upset participants or their communities?  And what of the role of power here and in other aspects of the research process?

JH

CfP: European Sociological Association 11th Conference-Turin, Italy, 28 – 31 August 2013

This year’s European Sociological Association (ESA) bi-annual conference will be held in Turin (Torino), Italy, on the 28 – 31 August 2013.  The general theme is on ‘Crisis, Critique and Change’, and the pdf containing calls for all the networks and streams is here (though, annoyingly, without hyperlinks in the contents section to each of the different streams…sigh).  I hope to attend, and have a few potential papers that I am thinking of presenting.  Hopefully I will be able to drum up some money from somewhere.

Abstracts must be submitted online by the 1st of February-so hurry up!

The network that I am most associated with is RN11, the sociology of emotions network.  These are a a great bunch of international scholars-warm, welcoming, interesting, insightful-so I urge you, if you have research that engages with emotions and emotionality, to consider submitting to these sessions.  The specific RN11 call is below.  Hope to see you there!

JH

RN11 – Sociology of emotions

Coordinators:
Jochen Kleres jkleres@gmx.de University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Stina Bergman Blix Stina.BergmanBlix@sociology.su.se Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Sylvia Terpe sylvia.terpe@googlemail.com Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

The continuously growing field of the sociology of emotions has demonstrated that emotions are of fundamental significance to all aspects of social life. As a theoretical endeavor, the sociology of emotions aims at becoming superfluous as a separate field of scholarly interest by integrating into mainstream sociology. For this reason, we welcome papers that investigate the role of emotions in all aspects of society and social life. While all high-quality papers with a central focus on emotions will be considered, we also suggest a number of possible special topics listed below. This includes also contributions from neighboring disciplines that have significant relevance to sociology.

Sessions

• 01RN11 Theorizing Emotions

Key theoretical frameworks for the sociological analysis of emotions have stood the test of time during more than thirty years since they launched the sociology of emotions. Nevertheless, the potential for sociological theorizing of emotions is far from exhausted. For instance, the classics of sociology, far from mute on emotions, provide a valuable source of inspiration. Theoretical frameworks such as that of Norbert Elias may also engender innovative theorizing. While sociological interest in emotions is swiftly growing, emotions are still not recognized by mainstream social theorizing as a fundamental aspect of social life. We want to encourage contributions that try to develop innovative theories of emotions as well as theories that demonstrate how emotions can be integrated into social theorizing more generally.

• 02RN11 Specific Emotions

Despite a history of several decades, the sociology of emotions has by and large not explored and theorized specific emotions. We welcome papers which develop theories of specific emotions that are highly relevant to social theorizing in general as well as useful for empirical research.

• 03RN11 Morality, Values and Emotions

Morality, moral orientations and moral values have a long tradition in sociological research and theorizing. But how is their relation with emotions to be conceptualized? Are there particular ‘moral emotions’, and if so what constitutes a ‘moral emotion’? How are moral orientations and moral actions affected by emotions? Do emotions qualify as a substitute for lacking moral values? We welcome theoretical contributions as well as empirical studies dedicated to these questions.

• 04RN11 Finance

Recent periods of economic turmoil in the world have the potential of shaking entrenched beliefs in the sober objective rationality of the economic sphere and its actors. Arguably, not only the recurring economic crises but also everyday finance business demonstrate that emotions are a key to all economic action and finance in particular.

• 05RN11 Law

Just like finance, the law is often conceived as a realm of objectivity and rationality. Burgeoning research shows that emotions are a pervasive feature of law and the court system. Papers that pinpoint, for instance, the role of emotion management by judges, emotions in court interaction, emotions and notions of justice, etc. are welcome.

• 06RN11 Methods

There is still a dearth of methodological reflection for empirical emotion research. We welcome papers that present approaches to studying emotions empirically. Specific issues could include, but are not limited to: how can researchers deal with their own emotions within the analysis? How can one delineate an emotional culture empirically? How can one approach emotions within a transnational analysis? How can different approaches to empirical research inform a focus on emotions? How would they have to be developed?

• 07RN11 Post-Atrocities Emotions

In the past two-three decades resurgence in idealism, calling on societies split by violent conflicts to pursue truth, justice and reconciliation (often cast as a preconditions for making a transition to democracy), has re-asserted itself. Both trans-nationally and in each of the societies whose members had taken part in atrocities, there are attempts to formulate rules for post-atrocity times which spell out which emotions are prescribed and which are proscribed. Contributions are welcome highlighting in a critical way these emotional regimes and the vested interests behind them. How are emotions and emotional practices used and negotiated in order to come to terms with what has happened, to castigate perpetrators or to heal and forgive? This might also relate to explorations into the emotional dimensions of trauma.

Continued after the jump!

Adam Curtis-On Hugs, Television and Socio-emotional Change

Film and documentary maker Adam Curtis, perhaps best known for his theoretically-informed BBC documentaries such as The Century of the Self (2002-available here), The Power of Nightmares (2004-here) and The Trap — What Happened to our Dream of Freedom  (2007-here), all of which I recommend to students, has a recent blogpost that I found particularly interesting.  Ostensibly about hugs, what the post and the numerous clips from the BBC’s TV archives (where Curtis appears to live) depict are changes in emotional regimes and feeling rules through time.  As usual, his approach is critical.  He writes that, while he wants to ‘tell a brief history of the rise of the Hug on TV and also show some of the strange, odd heroic figures who held out against it’, he also wishes to ask:

(W)hether the TV hug has become oppressive and limiting….That not only has it become a rigid convention – as rigid as anything in Victorian times – but because it teaches that we should concentrate on our own inner feelings, it also stops us from looking outside ourselves and thinking imaginatively about the society and the world around us.  I want to suggest that the Hug has become a part of the modern problem of not being able to imagine any alternative to the world of today. The Hug is no longer liberating, it is restraining.

It is the clips themselves that are most interesting, depicting, as they do, a fundamentally different ‘structure of feeling’, in Raymond Williams’ terms.  Williams defines structures of feeling as ‘social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available…. Yet this specific solution is never mere flux. It is a structured formation’.  He continues, with echoes of A.N.Whitehead to suggest that:

The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’…. We are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice variable…. An alternative definition would be structures of experience…. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity (Williams, Marxism & Literature, pp.132-3).

While Williams, at the time, was almost apologetic about using the term ‘feeling’ and at pains to justify it’s use, today, post the (so-called)’affective/emotional turn’, we can perhaps be more confidant in speaking of these matters.  For me, what the clips suggest or display is an emotional world and an emotional ‘being-in-the-world’ (or what might be called an emotional habitus) that is at once familiar, yet fundamentally different from the ones most of us live in and have today.

Take, for example, the first clip on Anna Neagle, who caused a scandal in 1958 by weeping, openly and continuously, in an early This is Your Life.  Both the programme makers and the public in general appear to have been scandalised by the public display of emotions and the lack of emotional control.  Even more poignant and unusual is the tale of Ministry of Defence clerk, Francis Beveridge, who’s generalized and articulate melancholia, is fascinating and strangely affecting.

The post is long, mainly due to the clips, but I recommend that you try to watch at least some of them.  One reflection on reading and viewing them again was that clips such as these, the archives of old documentaries in particular, might be useful tools for the contemporary sociologist of emotion in researching past emotional cultures and regimes, but also for teaching students about these (and other) core sociological concepts.  These appear to be under-utilized, yet clearly useful resources.

Enjoy,

JH

 

EDIT: Link to blog fixed! Also here.

Nicholas Christakis: The Sociological Science Behind Social Networks and Social Influence

Prof. Christakis gives a sort-of ‘sociology 101′ lecture that is engaging and offers a number of useful examples to elucidate some basic sociological concepts and thinkers, with a special focus on social networks and their applications to the much-vaunted ‘real world’. Enjoyable and fast-paced, with some fancypants graphics, it may help some of us to explain what it is we actually do and think about in sociology.  Or not.

Via The Big Think:

If You’re So Free, Why Do You Follow Others? The Sociological Science Behind Social Networks and Social Influence.

Nicholas Christakis, Professor of Medical Sociology, Medicine, and Sociology at Harvard University

If you think you’re in complete control of your destiny or even your own actions, you’re wrong. Every choice you make, every behavior you exhibit, and even every desire you have finds its roots in the social universe. Nicholas Christakis explains why individual actions are inextricably linked to sociological pressures; whether you’re absorbing altruism performed by someone you’ll never meet or deciding to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, collective phenomena affect every aspect of your life. By the end of the lecture Christakis has revealed a startling new way to understand the world that ranks sociology as one of the most vitally important social sciences.

The Floating University
Originally released September 2011.

‘Walled States, Waning Sovereignty’ Professor Wendy Brown, CCIG Keynote Lecture

I am affiliated with the wonderfully named ‘power cluster’ in the School of Political Science & Sociology at NUI Galway.  This occasionally makes me feel like a superhero. This intrepid group, somewhere on a scale between the Justice League and the Legion of Doom, meets once a month to discuss work related to our own research interests that has some relation to the notion of power, broadly defined.  This month we are reading the first chapter from Prof. Wendy Brown‘s recent book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010).  The lecture posted here basically covers the same ground.  Her argument is that the proliferation of walls and walling that we are witnessing worldwide, such as ‘The Wall’ separating Israel and Palestine  or the one on the US-Mexico Border, is a feature of contemporary globalization and (paradoxically, despite the theatrical show of physical dominance that such walls might symbolize) signals the waning of sovereignty for the nation-state.  These walls are not built to defend states from other national actors but rather to target nonstate, transnational actors, such as migrants and ‘terrorist’ groups etc.  For Brown, who wishes to differentiate her argument from Agamben (Homo Sacer) and Hardt and Negri (Empire), key to the loss of this national sovereignty are the domination of free-floating global capital and ‘God-sanctioned political violence’.  Rather than being a sign of nation-state dominance, these walls actually represent a deep-seated national anxiety about increasing sovereign impotence and an aspect of  the ‘theater state’ (though she does not mention Geertz here).  What is perhaps most interesting is her discussion of the ‘state of emergency’/'state of exception’, always provisional and temporary, yet a perpetual and seemingly permanent feature of the contemporary world.  This, of course, is well-trodden ground, particularly by (again) Agamben, following Schmitt.  But this is perhaps where I  also part company with Brown and her analysis of the waning of the nation-state, which may be a little over-stated.  Is it not the case that, for Schmitt, this discourse of the state of exception, or more specifically, the capacity or power to declare a state of exception is central to the notion of state sovereignty.  Far from being a sign of a weakened nation-state, is this capacity not a sure sign of the state’s enduring power?  And one which is exercised, when it is exercised (power is a capacity and should not be confused with it’s exercise), often in the face of vocal international opposition, such as in the case of Israel.

In any case, I enjoyed the chapter and hope to finish the book.  Enjoy the talk.