| Special Seminar at KURCPI |
|
What's Coming Up?
- Special Research Seminar, 19 April 2023
16:30-, The Interdivisional Education and Research Building , 5th
Floor
「Under the Spot Light: Islands at the Centres of Our World」
Godfrey Baldacchino (the University of Malta)
A discipline requires deserves its own journals, its own handbooks, its own associations, its own conferences, its own degree programmes, and its own collection of recommended readings. ‘Island Studies’ now has all of these. It now also has its own ‘how to’ research methods primer, which describes the particular challenges of doing research on (especially small) islands and on/about/for/by/with islanders. One that takes the ‘island as focus’ by the horns and locks in onto ‘the island condition’: islandness. This is an intervening variable which, in and of itself, does not cause anything; but can however contour and nudge behaviours and systems in particular ways and directions. Hence, the dispositions toward economic monopoly, societal intimacy and political totality in small island systems build a distinct “ecology of smallness” which is not typically found in larger, mainland communities.
This presentation offers a snapshot of the evolution of ‘island studies’, soon celebrating the 100th anniversary of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s pathbreaking book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). It particularly traces the movement of islands from dull, mendicant and forgotten peripheries and exotic research objects to central and symbolic players in the Anthropocene and subjects in the international relations of the post-1945 International World Order.
The presentation will be followed by a ‘question an answer’ session.
|
Toppage
cpi.kagoshima-u.ac.jp
