Strange Stones

Fri Feb 17

Human Evolution and Social Change
SHESC 340
Campus: Tempe
Cost: Free

The ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change presents Hugh Raffles, Professor of Anthropology in Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.

Raffles takes tentative steps into a new ethnographic project that explores the lives of rocks and stones. There are currently two central problems. One is familiar to anthropologists: What are the forms of life enacted by objects that, in "the Western philosophical tradition," are commonly considered inanimate? The second, although related, may be less familiar: What can we learn from stones? Raffles explores these questions ethnographically, assuming that they are susceptible to empirical investigation. He considers a limited set of cases, two of which are introduced in this talk: the ancient monuments of the British Isles and Chinese "scholar's rocks."