Call for papers

(RE)PRODUCTIVE TRADITIONS IN ANCIENT EGYPT

Conference, Liège (Belgium), Feb 6-8, 2013
Call for papers

Részletek a felhívás szövegéből: 

Objectives 

        

Tradition is central to Egyptology, yet individual traditions in textual, artistic and material production still await critical treatment, and methodological frameworks for micro-analysis are emergent. This conference seeks to address these issues in highlighting diachronic, diatopic and socio-cultural aspects of ancient Egyptian traditions.
The notion of (re)productivity offers a simple conceptual framework as a means of dealing with tradition, and the model adopted by Egyptological text criticism distinguishes between different kinds of transmission: productive or open traditions are in a state of flux that stands in dialectic relation to shifting social and historical circumstances, while reproductive or closed traditions are frozen at a particular historical moment and their formulations are thereafter faithfully passed down verbatim. While a narrow binary structure may be a little restrictive, a continuum between the two poles of dynamic productivity and static reproductivity is by all means relevant to and useful for the description of various types of symbolization, and probably all types of cultural production.
Methodologically speaking, scholars in textual analysis have made good use of the so-called “Textkritische Methode” for structuring (e.g. via stemmata) the description of reproductive traditions, but approaches to productive traditions could benefit from more organized frameworks. This applies equally to the fields of art-history and archaeology, where well-developed practices of typology and seriation often do not alone do justice to the complex unfolding of tradition that produces image and artefact. It is an aim of this conference to investigate common parameters for talking about the production of material, artistic and textual culture in ancient Egypt.

Confirmed Speakers

A number of invited speakers (specialists in text, art-history and material culture) have been confirmed for the conference.

Tamás Bács (Budapest) - Traditions old and new: artistic production of the late Ramesside period
Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley) - Ancient Egyptian Illusion
Christiana Köhler (Vienna) - Non-elite funerary culture in early Memphis
Gabriele Pieke (Berlin) - Lost in Transformation: Artistic Creation between Permanence and Change
Pascal Vernus (Paris) - The dialectic of productivity and reproductivity as a conceptual framework for refining the (socio)linguistic concept of égyptien de tradition
Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert (Leipzig) - If A, then B - Cross genre correspondences in early wisdom, medical, mathematical, and dream texts

Organising committee

Todd Gillen
Dimitri Laboury
Stéphane Polis
Jean Winand

Applications

Please send all abstracts to tjgillen@ulg.ac.be

Abstracts should be no more than one page in length (incl. bibliography, if needed) and will be reviewed by a selection committee. Deadline for submission of abstracts is 15th October 2012, with notification of acceptance by the end of October.