Enacting Culture -- Embodiment, Interaction and the Development of Human Culture

Conference Announcement

Theme: Enacting Culture -- Embodiment, Interaction and the Development of Human Culture

Type: International Conference

Institution: Heidelberg University Clinics and European Research Network TESIS ("Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity")

Location: Heidelberg (Germany)

Date: October 15-17, 2014

Extended deadline for poster submissions: 8/31, 2014

Website: http://www.enactingculture.unitt.de

Invited speakers include: Remo Bodei, Nicolas De Warren, Katerina Fotopoulou, Sara Heinämaa, Laurence Kirmayer, Dermot Moran, Ezequiel di Paolo, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese, Peter Henningsen, Dan Hutto, Vasu Reddy, Andreas Roepstorff, Dan Zahavi

__________________________________________________

The conference addresses the complex reciprocal interplay of biological and social factors in the shaping and development of human culture. Three main sections will address the following questions:

1) Nature and Culture: Continuity, Emergence or Negation?

Enactivism investigates the sensorimotor capacities that enable humans and animals to interact with the environment and conspecifics in particular ways. Can culture be considered as a continuous development of such natural embodied skills, does it "emerge" from the basic forms of social interaction, or does it rather require a "negation" or some form of distancing from nature?

2) Embodied Intersubjectivity as a Basis of Culture

Can the new paradigm of embodied and enactive approach to intersubjectivity contribute to a clarification of cultural phenomena? How shall we conceptualize the relation between pre-linguistic intersubjective phenomena and higher symbolic phenomena that involve language?

3) Psychopathology and Culture

What are the principal anthropological preconditions for humans to be vulnerable to mental illness? Which cultural settings make it more or less probable for certain types of mental illness to appear and spread in a population? Could psychopathological states be interpreted as withdrawals from the common sphere of the cultural life-world and thus from embodied interactions?

Please find more information on the conference website: