The European Society for Oceanists (ESfO) was established on the occasion of the First European Colloquium on Pacific Studies in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) in 1992. The society addresses itself to researchers with a regional interest in Oceania.
In the context of an increasingly integrated Europe the Society aims to enhance intellectual exchange and cooperation between individual researchers and between scholarly institutions, both within and outside Europe. This goal is to be achieved by maintaining an information network, by organizing conferences and by other appropriate means.
13th ESfO Conference
Ajaccio, Corsica
2 to 5 June 2022
Organizers: CREDO (Centre for Research and Documentation on Oceania), Marseille, France
and Department of Cultures and Civilizations, University of Verona, Italy
CONFERENCE THEME
Material and Immaterial in Motion
Oceania’s vast geography, seascape, and history are full of movement.
The circulation of people and things in extended networks has long captured attention. From the distant past to our shared future, the Pacific was, is, and will be shaped by movements: movements of people and of things, of ideas and images, of power and ideology, of capital, of shifting geopolitical and scientific interests, and of circulating discourses about change, development, and degradation. In the Pacific we know the material and the immaterial, as well as their relationship, through their motion.
The conference opens a forum for the discussion of Pacific dynamics, and for thinking about the relationships between material and immaterial, about how each appear and disappear, how they are invoked, created, mobilized, stabilized, and how their distinction even dissolves. Movements, both material and immaterial, and between these states, are central to the manifestation of spirituality, to politics, to the practices of science and the abstraction of data, to health and wellbeing, and in the construction of objects. They are there in the flows of migration, the engagement of Pacific men and women in arts, performances, and ritual. The specific articulations of their features, and thus their relation, are key to understanding social processes and forms. Taking material and immaterial, and motion, as key terms, one might also interrogate the philosophical, cultural, and conceptual distinctions between them in different places and times. Does it make sense, for example, to talk of material or immaterial as if they were separate aspects of a process, if so to whom, and in what context? What specific transformations of material and immaterial should we focus on, and why? These are questions that, in dialogue with Pacific peoples and realities, past and present, we can learn much from attending to. The conference seeks to advance the agenda of understanding the dynamic motion of Oceania.
CALL FOR PANELS IS CLOSED
CALL FOR PAPERS WILL OPEN SOON.
Check the Conference Website regularily