Date/Time
Date(s) - 1 Feb 2013
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
Fayerweather 411
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join the Columbia Center for International History for:
DEEP HISTORY: A SEMINAR WITH DANIEL LORD SMAIL
with commentary by Rivka Feldhay (Tel Aviv University, director of “Migrating Knowledge”)
Friday, February 1
10:00-12:00
Fayerweather 411
In recent years, the historical profession has been energized by the turn to international histories that escape the grip of the nation-state. Deep history, the subject of this seminar, builds on the same boundary-crossing impulse, but it works across time instead of space. Rather than the nation-state, the approach hopes to escape the grip of modernity itself. Apart from that, the intellectual agenda and rewards of international history and deep history are essentially the same. Or are they? We hope to explore this large question through the lens of materiality, the body, and the play of scale.
Daniel Lord Smail is professor of history at Harvard University, where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies in the later middle ages. In recent years he has joined with others in developing a new kind of history that uses all the available sources for understanding the human past, using evidence ranges from genes and languages to artifacts, fossils, and texts. His recent books include *On Deep* *History and the Brain *(2008) and, with Andrew Shryock et al., *Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present* (2011).
Recommended reading:
“Food,” “Goods,” and “Scale,” in Andrew Shryrock, Daniel Lord Smail, et al., *Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present* (University of California Press, 2011). Click here for publisher´s page. http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520274624
David Graeber, “The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present,” in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (AK Press, 2007), pp. 57-84. Available for download at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cih/c_calendar.htm.