|
The conference is meant to be oriented toward the future of theoretical considerations about the past. There are several reasons to think that history considered as a field of study which originated in the early 19th century (when it began to be taught at the University) is in a deep crisis. However, the word "crisis" does not need to be taken in a purely negative sense and considered as synonymous with degeneration or connected with the postmodernist discourses of various "ends" and "deaths." The Greek word "crisis" originates in Hippocratic medicine, where it indicates a "turning point" of a disease, a sudden change for better or for worse. In this sense, "crisis" may be connected with the word "kairos" - a proper time, a time of opportunity and fulfilment, A chance, A moment pregnant with some revealed meanings. Crisis/kairos is a metaphorical designation of a cultural moment pregnant with promise and new beginnings. In historical thought, as well as in cultural critique in general, our time might be considered a proper moment to "begin again."
The primary goal of the conference is to debate the basic concepts of thinking about the past in an interdisciplinary perspective as historical time, archeological space, and anthropological experience. Other suggested topics include:
- categories that would oppose or "rewrite" the modernist categories of thinking about the past;
- debates about the future of the social sciences as debates about the future conception of the human being;
- a universal idiom of translation that would allow us to talk about our pasts in a common way;
- what can "we" learn from other cultures and their approaches to the past?
- multiparadigmatic and holistic methodology
- the fetish of the historical source (interpreting historical/anthropological "evidence");
- ethnographer, storyteller and philosopher - three in one;
- what comes after history?
- history as a dialogue with the past, present and future;
- a paradox of modernist categories combined with postmodernist thinking;
- Is history still a discipline?
- the end of Aristotelian "dictatorship" and the future of historical theory.
|
