Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow, “Sensing the Unseen”

The Anthropology Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will appoint an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2010-2011 academic year. The Fellow will be involved in the scholarly activities of the nine-month Sawyer Seminar, “Sensing the Unseen.”

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the sensory and media modes that scholars and lay people employ to access realms of existence and experience outside the immediately visible. Hosted at MIT, the seminar will include faculty and students from around the Cambridge-Boston area, drawing from those who study anthropology, history, music, art, architecture, religion, and science and technology studies (STS).

The Fellow will work closely with the seminar directors, Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson, and two dissertation fellows to plan, organize, and participate in monthly seminar events during the academic year. The Fellow will also have the opportunity to deliver a public lecture on his or her own research as part of the seminar.

The appointment will be from August 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011. Stipend is $50,000.

Eligibility: Candidates must have earned the doctoral degree no earlier than January 2006 and no later than July 2010. Although preference may be given to scholars in anthropology and/or science and technology studies, applications from other humanities and social science fields will be considered.

Application: Letters of application and supporting material should include the following: 1) A two-page cover letter stating your interest in the Postdoctoral Fellowship providing details on your current research and how it would benefit from and contribute to the Sawyer Seminar; 2) A curriculum vitae; 3) Two letters of reference; 4) One writing sample (30 pages maximum).

Apply: Send all application materials electronically by 5:00 p.m. on March 1, 2010 to the MIT Anthropology Program, c/o Amberly Steward: asteward@mit.edu . Recommendation letters should be emailed directly by the referees to the same email address by the same deadline. Please direct any questions regarding the application process to the above address.

MIT is an AA/EO employer and encourages applications from women and minority candidates.

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SENSING THE UNSEEN

Sawyer Seminar Series
MIT Anthropology
2010-2011

“… he had to wait for the moment when he saw the invisible … ”

Henning Mankell, Kennedy's Brain

“The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.”

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Overview

This year-long seminar will explore how scholars in the social sciences and humanities study the unseen. Seeking to join more familiar attention to material culture with an innovative focus on immaterial culture, we pose the following questions: How might we best apprehend and represent the obscure, the elusive, the invisible, the occult, the uncanny? How should we describe the similarities and differences between that which is invisible and that which is as yet unvisualized, that which is unrepresented and that which is, perhaps, unrepresentable?

Setting out from an anthropological vantage point in understanding sensory apprehension to be culturally informed, this seminar will discuss recent scholarship on the sensory and media modes that people employ to access realms of existence and experience outside the immediately visible.

Moving our sights away from the solidity of human artifacts and tangibility of institutions, our seminar enters the space where phenomena and practices have been made legible only through human effort. The instruments of modern science visualize physical matter too small or distant to be seen by the naked eye. These instruments enable us to see far away stars, but also to discern cells, the structure of carbon rings, and neural pathways within brains. The technologies of the social sciences, meanwhile, map patterns not small or distant but rather configurations of human action that are just that: arrangements of transactions whose patterns are emergent abstractions. They are made visible through representations of our interpretations of what we have seen and heard. Social scientific representations of social action are several steps removed from immediate material experience. Markets, states, education, religion, kinship, and law are the cumulated consequences of heterogeneous interactions.

Traveling farther toward the unseen as the obscure, elusive, occult, and uncanny, we arrive at the heart of our seminar's concern. We wish to grapple with how to portray the-just-out-view, how to listen for presences at the edges of social perception, how to pry into processes difficult to communicate intersubjectively such as pain or trauma, how to capture evanescent worlds of taste, how to measure or account for processes outside of everyday palpability or scale (e.g., radiation, climate change, global finance). We arrive, too, at questions of how to engage spiritual worlds entirely unseen, whose existence is a source of continuing contest. Here at the farthest end of our analytic spectrum, we locate those phenomena apprehended by some, experienced by many, and equally denied by others: ghosts, spirits, witches, angels, and gods. Although they are unseen, we cannot say that they do not exist, at least as human constructs. We experience the consequences of belief in, for example, black magic during the witch hunts in 17 th century Massachusetts , to say nothing of powerful cosmological commitments in the present day United States to the ensoulment of zygotes.


Cases Compared

We organize the seminar around six species of the unseen: The Obscure, The Elusive, The Invisible, The Evanescent, The Unaccounted, The Occult/Uncanny. (See Topics below for elaboration.) The first four are keyed to canonical sensory modes: sight, sound, touch, and taste. The remaining two are joined to questions of how the unseen is measured, managed, and made, at scales from the sub-visible to the geopolitical. In all of the cases, we grapple with how media technologies are increasingly entangled with human sensoria, with effects for how the unseen may be newly visualized, apprehended, or may yet continue to resist representation. By ranging widely across everyday and structural domains, and by juxtaposing Western, African, and Asian case studies, we hope to bring into conversation scholars who, while often thinking about similar sensory and epistemological dynamics, may not have much opportunity to speak with people working outside their sub-disciplinary communities.

If the warp of our seminar is made of distinct genres of the unseen as well as the sensory and social practices they summon, then the weft is made of three conceptual threads, each of which fastens on a different scale of action and experience.

Disembodied Agency

How does the unseen operate as a vector of agency? How should we theorize the social effects of forces subvisible (e.g., the nanotechnological, the molecular), natural-technical (e.g., electromagnetism, neuroanatomy), technocratic (e.g., financial conjuring in futures markets), and supernatural (e.g., spirits, ghosts, God)? Drawing on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe , which calls for social scientific and historical explanation to make room for the causal force of the supernatural in social dynamics, we hope to describe and theorize new kinds of what science studies scholars have called “non-human agency” — though now including evanescent, ephemeral, and just-out-of-sight agency.

Individual Agency

How should we understand individual embodiment in relation to the unseen? Since Marcel Mauss, social theorists have struggled to comprehend how social relations and fields of power are somatized , anchored in individual bodies and dispositions. What kinds of sensory habituses — tastes, infirmities, insecurities, hauntings — develop when persons are confronted with or inhabited by phenomena that are elusive or occult? How do we as scholarly analysts do justice to people's deeply subjective, often inexpressible, experience at the same time that we draw connections between material and immaterial artifacts of sociality and power?

Social Structure

What are the spaces of the unseen in the everyday lives of communities? How might attention to the unseen articulate with efforts to rescue and represent subaltern histories? Neoliberal attempts to open markets, democratize knowledge, expand mass media, and promote transparency as a means of good governance would appear to amplify the seen. But at the same time, increasing economic disparity, political corruption, efforts to expand intellectual property, the privatization of information, and the conspiracies that govern disorder on the streets and in the financial world have heightened people's sense of powerlessness to access emerging realms of knowledge or to exercise power within them. Capitalist culture and occult practice are no strangers to one another. The felt need of the world's poor and marginalized to acquire the right sort of knowledge to succeed in today's markets and bureaucracies generates social anxiety as well as collective searches for additional, newly efficacious ways of conjuring the unseen.

Procedure

The Sawyer Seminar will meet once a month, bringing together faculty and students throughout the Boston metro area. Each session will feature research presentations by two invited speakers, followed by discussion led by one or two local scholars.

Topics to be addressed are:

The Obscure: Filming and Photographing

The Elusive: Listening

The Invisible: Feeling

The Evanescent: Tasting

The Unaccounted: Measuring

The Occult and Uncanny: Governing

A list of speakers will be forthcoming.