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The 11th International Political Anthropology Summer School, Acquapendente, Italy
Political Alchemy - Creative Destruction is the title of International Political Anthropology Summer School 2020. This is the 11th year of this successful Summer School which is held in Italy for one week in June.
Please follow Summer School and membership application procedure at the website of the IPA journal: www.politicalanthropology.org.
Political Alchemy – creative destruction
The 11th International Political Anthropology Summer School
Place: Italy, Acquapendente
Duration: 1 week, 21-27 June 2020
By pairing together political alchemy and the idea of creative destruction, the aim of the summer school is to revisit theoretically, in a comparative historical and anthropological framework, the problem of political alchemy, in light of the recent, all but completely unanticipated developments in politics, through the prism of the ideas of creative destruction, disruption, and permanent revolution, ideas now promoted by business schools, but originally coined by revolutionary avant-gardes. While being obsessed with equal rights, scrupulous attention to processes and policies, and the rule of law, we still seem desperately in need of destruction in order to go forward and progress. However, by now it seems evident that the idea of moving forward through destruction only leads to the proliferation of the incommensurable, the flux and the void. Mainstream and critical social and political sciences, caught in between rigid institutionalism and obsession with revolutionary change, schismogenic doubles, are incapable of understanding the processes that are being increasingly unleashed upon all of us, entailing the destruction of meaning, even the destruction of nature. Something fundamental is missing at the level of basic concepts, and the aim of this summer school is to offer a perspective from political anthropology, using terms like liminality, imitation, schismogenesis, the spiral and the ‘trickster’, but also gift relations and participation, that could tackle the transformations generated by political alchemy that evidently fall outside the scope of modern critical rationality.
Course leader: Dr Agnes Horvath, founding and chief editor, IPA
Target group: PhD students in the fields of Sociology, Anthropology, Politics and International Relations, Philosophy, History, or other cognate disciplines. In some cases we also accept Master students, upon successful application.
Credits info: 5 for attendance, 10 if also finishing a 5000 words paper