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2013 schedule
GRENZEN:Setzen - achten - öffnen
8-12 May 2013 - Hotel La Perla, Ascona
Vorträge und Gespräche mit Dr. Markus Erni, Dr. Alfred Gugolz, und Alessandro Gugolz.
Informationen: Dr. Alfred Gugolz, email: al.gugolz@bluewin.ch - Tel. 071 761 12 30
POSTPONED - Seminars - Buddhism and Awareness - POSTPONED
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the seminars have had to be postponed, and will be rescheduled shortly.
Led by Tenzin Demey (Dharamsala, India) and Dr. Angela Hobart (Director, Centro Incontri Umani), the session on 11 May is entitled 'Awakening Our True Potential' and that on 18 May, 'Everyday Enlightenment'. The Seminars take place at the Sala Gioia, Monte Verità, Ascona on Saturdays from 9.00 to 12.00am and will be in English with informal Italian translation.
28 February 2013: Book Publication - Shamanism and Islam: Sufism, Healing Rituals and Spirits in the Muslim World, edited by Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart
The figure of the shaman has always been a prominent motif within the Islamic world, particularly in relation to the mystical domain of Sufism. Here, Thierry Zarcone and Angela Hobart offer a vigorous and authoritative exploration of the link between Islam and shamanism in contemporary Muslim culture, examining how the old practice of shamanism was combined with elements of Sufism in order to adapt to wider Islamic society. Shamanism and Islam thus surveys shamanic practices in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, to show how the Muslim shaman, like his Siberian counterpart, cultivated personal relations with spirits to help individuals through healing and divination. It explores the complexities and variety of rituals, involving music, dance and, in some regions, epic and bardic poetry, demonstrating the close links between shamanism and the various arts of the Islamic world. This is the first in-depth exploration of 'Islamized shamanism', and is a valuable contribution to the field of Islamic Studies, Religion, Anthropology, and an understanding of the Middle East more widely.
Thierry Zarcone is Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, based at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. He has held visiting professorships at Kyoto and Fribourg, Switzerland, and is an expert on Islamic Studies and the history of systems of thought in the Turko-Iranian region.
Angela Hobart is Executive Director of Centro Incontri Umani (CIU), Switzerland, Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology at University College London, Honorary Reader at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Visiting Professor in Social Anthropology at the Swiss Italian University, Lugano and Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London
Published by I.B. Tauris.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-848856-02-8, £59.50 (GBP)
2012 schedule
Opera recital by Gianluca Paganelli and Saffron Jones
20:30, 23 August 2012 - Chiesa di Sant' Antonio - Arcegno
Performing a medley of works by Vivaldi, Händel, Verdi, Puccini, Bizet, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and others. Free entry.
Visualising Crises: An Anthropological Film Programme
30 July - 3 August 2012 - Monte Verità, Ascona
A Visual Anthropology Workshop held by the Centro Incontri Umani Foundation in co-operation with the Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival (www.gieff.de). Included in the programme is a public screening of Koukan Kourcia, The Cry of the Turtle-dove, directed by: Sani Elhadj Magori, Niger, 2011.
Koukan Kourcia, The Cry of the Turtle-dove
30 June 2012: Book Publication - Contesting the State: The Dynamics of Resistance and Control, edited by Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer
The state is frequently conceived as a universal, although one apparently extraordinarily difficult to define. It often appears in academic discourse and, especially, in the popular imagination as an abstraction, usually nebulous, grasped as pervasive - a spectre to be feared. In this book, distinguished scholars from around the world take issue with this purported universality, exploring alternative imaginings of the state, of power and of global processes at the margins.
Taking an anthropological perspective based in diverse ethnographic contexts outside Europe and North America, if not beyond their controlling influence in globalizing realities, this volume reveals different complexes of power, as well as processes that are external to power and often against it (contra Foucault, and as Pierre Clastres has famously argued).
The authors stress not only the different structures of institutional power, but also the persistence or transmutation of local kinds of power and their relevant cosmologies into contemporary globalized settings. They find innovative kinds of modernity, reconfigurations that have effects that cannot be reduced to over-generalized and often intensely Eurocentric concepts of power and the kinds of subjectivities realized by them. In this, the volume opens up the diversity of experiences of the state and offers new directions for its study.
CONTENTS: Acknowledgements; Contributors; Introduction: Forces in the production of the state - Bruce Kapferer and Christopher C. Taylor; Chapter 1: The phenomenology of a stateless society: Non-dualism, identity and hierarchical anarchy among the Nuer - T.M.S. Evens; Chapter 2: Society against the tyrant: Power, violence and the poetics of an Amazonian egalitarianism - Joanna Overing; Chapter 3: Tribalism and power in Iraq: Saddam Hussein' s 'house' - Hosham Dawod; Chapter 4: An altered state?: Continuity, change and cosmology in Rwandan notions of the state - Christopher C. Taylor; Chapter 5: Post-war realities in Sri Lanka: From the crime of war to the crime of peace in Sri Lanka? - Bruce Kapferer and Roshan de Silva Wijeyeratne; Chapter 6: The Hindu epics, theatre and the Indonesian state: Violence and cosmic regeneration - a Balinese perspective - Angela Hobart; Chapter 7: The death of divine kingship in Nepal: Nepal's move from autocratic monarchy to fragile republican state - Bal Gopal Shrestha; Chapter 8: Expectations of the state: An exile returns to his country - Laurie Kane Hart; Chapter 9: Diametric to concentric dualism: Cosmopolitan intellectuals and the re-configuration of the state - Jonathan Friedman; Index.
Angela Hobart is Director of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland, and a Research Fellow, Medical Anthropology Department, University College London, UK.
Bruce Kapferer is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bergen University, Norway, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University, Australia and Honorary Professor at University College London, UK.
Published by Sean Kingston Publishing in association with the Centro Incontri Umani.
Hardback, ISBN 978-1-907774-13-3, £59.99 (GBP), $119.99 (USD)
Culture and Health: What is Human Wellbeing?
15-16 June 2012 - Monte Verità, Ascona
A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary discussion on the cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary understanding of human wellbeing, addressing in particular the following questions: Have our existing disciplinary borders actually inhibited us from rethinking the shifting frameworks within which human health is understood? How might we benefit from comparing notions of human wellbeing that get generated in diverse cultural and disciplinary traditions? Are there specific arenas in which cultures and disciplines exhibit such shifts? Can what we learn from examining such diversity be brought to bear on our understanding of how wellbeing is socially constructed as 'health'? In what ways might we become more responsive to new and emerging social needs in the area of human wellbeing? Are there, as it were 'bottom-up' innovations that more structured institutions are slow to respond to and might respond to more affectively if they were better understood?
Convenors: David Napier and Angela Hobart
Symbolic Expressions: Jung, Dada and the Art of Wellbeing - Prof. Sonu Shamdasani
15 June 2012, 20:30 - Monte Verità, Ascona
This talk situates Jung's pictorial work in his Red Book, Liber Novus. It reconstructs the intersection between figures of the Dada movement in Zurich and Jung's circle, and the proximities and distances between their concerns and his work, as well with his critique of modern art. It charts the increasing interest of psychiatrists and psychologists in the psychology and pathology of creativity. It shows how through his formulation of the mandala, Jung conceived what could be termed an art of well-being.
2011 schedule
Pilgrimages and Sanctuaries: Art, Music and Rituals
11-12 November 2011 - Monte Verità, Ascona
A conference exploring the relation of art and music to religious pilgrimages in several areas of the world. The focus will be on the pilgrimage dynamic, rather than on the saints or deities thus venerated, as well as on the historical, anthropological, aesthetic and symbolical dimensions of the creative configurations associated with the pilgrimage complex. Convenors: Thierry Zarcone, Pedram Khosronejad and Angela Hobart.
Swiss Postgraduate Seminars - Myth and Ritual
7-9 October 2011 - Monte Verità, Ascona
A module of the Swiss Postgraduate Programme in Anthropology organized by Prof. Heinz Käufeler (University of Zurich) and Angela Hobart (Director, Centro Incontri Umani), and with contributinos from Hideko Mitsui (University of Tokyo/Cambridge) and Bal Gopal Shrestha (Oxford University). Open to all.
list of participating students and their theses
Visual Anthropology Workshop: Film Screening (free entry)
2-5 August 2011, 6.30 p.m. - Monte Verità, Ascona
The last mountain farmers of Prugiasco (Mon), Bunong's birth practices between tradition and change (Tue), The Storyteller (Fri). Convened by the Centro Inconti Umani in collaboration with the Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival.
The Moral Borders of Self and Other: Migration, Reconcilition and Human Well-being
3-4 June 2011, 8.30 p.m. - Monte Verità, Ascona
An international conference engaging with the humanity and morality of migration. Convened by David Napier and Angela Hobart.
Middle Eastern Music Concert
Khyam Allami performs 'Resonance/Dissonance'
4 June 2011, 8.30 p.m. - Sala Balint, Monte Verità, Ascona
At this special concert, Khyam will present his debut album,Resonance/Dissonance, in it's entirety, accompanied by percussionist Vasilis Sarikis.
2010 schedule
Pilgrimage and Sanctuaries: Film Screening
13 November 2010 - Monte Verità, Ascona
A public screening of three films: 'The Sanctuary of the Seven Sleepers in the Silk Road', 'The Pilgrimage to the Seven Regraga in Morocco' and 'The Red Sufi'.
Pilgrimage and Sanctuaries: Ambiguity in Context
11 - 13 November 2010 - Monte Verità, Ascona
A conference exploring the theme of pilgrimages and 'ambiguous'sanctuaries, from a wide range of locations, in which different belief systems are entwined, assimilated or superimposed on one another. Convenors: Thierry Zarcone, Pedram Khosronejad and Angela Hobart.
Coping with Global Changes: AnAnthropological Film Programme
2 - 5 August 2010 - Monte Verità, Ascona
On the occasion of the Visual Anthropology Workshop, the Centro Incontri Umani Foundation presents five documentaries in co-operation with the Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival (www.gieff.de).
Retreat Seminars - The Healing Power of Love and Awareness
27 March - 1 May 2010 - Monte Verità, Ascona
Organized by Lama Geshe Gedun Tharchin (accomplished Tibetan meditation master, spiritual director of Lamrim Institute, Rome) and Angela Hobart (Executive Director of the Centro Inconti Umani, Anthropologist and Psychodynamic Therapist).
Indian Classical Music Concert - 'Basant', The Colour of Spring
6 April 2010, 20:30 - Sala Balint, Monte Verità Ascona
The name Basant is from Sanskrit vasant meaning 'spring', and it is a very old raga dating from the 8th century, performed in slow and medium-fast tempos. This raga is a symbol of Love (spiritual and human). In India it used to be considered that when Lord Krishna and Goddes Radhika were mating and dancing with joy it was appropriate to perform to celebrate this holy situation.
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