Skip to main content

"Primitive Within: Anthropology and the Encounter with the Internal Other"

The anthropologist Theo Rak is famed amongst a certain London milieu as an inspirational figure. To borrow his own style of presenting guest speakers, words will always fail to encapsulate the conceptual clarity and groundbreaking vision offered by the brilliance with which Professor Rak architectures cultural events in this cosmopolitan cultural underground. In the capital of the empire where once the sun would never set, night time comes at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Most people retire earlier to their familial shelters, find comfort in blankets stolen from British Airways airplanes and parallelize their gazes to the infinite meeting point of television screens. Prof Rak invests his energy in intersecting eyes and voices to share thoughts and weave new ideas to the new century. Past events included two fantastic symposia on different perspectives on Love. On Saturday, taking advantage of a rare presence in London of Greek anthropologist and filmmaker Konstantinos Kostakis, and of the magnificent hospitality provided by French ethnologist of body motion Nana Bouts, Theo, as he humbly prefers to be called, brought together an array of disciplinary approaches to a hitherto neglected problem in social sciences. The title of the session suffices in eloquence and anything that could be said about the content of the presentations, as brilliant as they indeed were, will be either redundant or take many pages of texts and images. While we await the publication of these, let us read the title of the session over and over again for it does help us to overcome bedazzlement and bewilderment before the age we inhabit.
The Primitive Within: Anthropology and the Encounter with the Internal Other The Primitive Within: Anthro...

Popular posts from this blog

The boy and the soldiers

Sitting on the riverbank I watch what floats by. The stream brings a child sitting on a hospital bed. He must be 12, about my son’s age. A bandage hangs from his left shoulder where his arm should be. He cries conpulsively, in a foreign language, so I can only imagine what he is saying. His wailing reminds me of phantom pain, and the tearful words seem to mourn the sudden amputation of his childhood, possibly performed without anaesthetic. But then I realise that his cries may refer to a deeper pain. Maybe the blast that took his arm also took his mum. Maybe all his family, as many in Gaza these days. Before this story enters into a loop, I flick it away with my thumb, making the stream move forward. Another image stops in front of me. Three young men on a desert road dance to Staying Alive by Bee Gees. Their faces look very familiar to me. But it’s not easy to see their faces. They are partially covered with helmets and their bodies are surrounded by military gear. They don’t sp...
Read more

Minute nods

Life in the city is made possible by a fragile web of mutual trust, though a filigree of unspoken pleasantries, and an intricate meshwork of altruistic gestures. A permanent exchange of mute interrogations and minute nods between strangers forms a complex language that ensures the common conditions for survival. Of course we can see bodies looking past other bodies, trying to walk though, overtake, get there before them, without knowing very well where exactly is there, or whether there is in fact a desired place, or if what there is to do there is actually what needs doing. But that is always what is emphasised when talking about the city, isn't it, the rat race. It's a gross version of urban metabolism in which life and its processes are reduced to competition between contained unities, as if one had just arrived from a rushed reading of the theory of evolution and had forgotten how life is sustained by a convuluted tangle of symbiotic connections with other animals, pla...
Read more

Aprender a Contar

Até agora pudemos dar-nos ao luxo de sermos indivíduos. Tipo, Apareceu-me hoje um indivíduo lá no escritório… Ou tipo, O que me interessa é estar de bem com a minha consciência individual. Pudemos ser indivíduos, cada um com o seu perfil. Cada um mais um comentador politico competindo por atenção na rede, imitando aqueles indivíduos que na televisão e na rádio criticam outros indivíduos sem serem capazes de se entenderem com qualquer grupo para fazer seja o que for. Até agora, fomos indivíduos, relacionámo-nos singularmente, com sistemas burocráticos, cada uma de nós mais um eu, todas diferentes todas iguais, todas jogando o mesmo jogo de singulares.   Até agora temos sido livres para sermos indivíduos, todos com objectos iguais nos nossos espaços privados: cada um com a sua TV, o seu micro-ondas, o seu computador pessoal, a sua chaleira eléctrica, a sua torradeira, o seu telefone esperto e a sua rede de WIFI separada da dos seus vizinhos por uma password super secret...
Read more