The Humanities Conference 2003
held at the University of the Aegean on the Island of Rhodes, Greece
Report on the First International Conference on New Directions in the
Humanities
Rhodes, Greece, 2-5 July 2003
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak leads a discussion in the courtyard
Hosted and organized by:
The four-day conference was attended by 372 participants from 18 countries including Australia, Canada,
China, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, New Zealand, Russia,
South Africa, Taiwan, UK, United Arab Emirates, and USA. The conference involved seven main plenary
sessions and 20 parallel sessions in which 237 papers and 29 workshops were presented, as well as a
host of cultural events. Since the conference, 120 papers have been submitted to be reviewed for
inclusion in the International Journal of Humanities. The papers span the breadth of the disciplines that
make up the humanities, linked together by the overall conference theme, ‘The Next World Order’ and the
sub-themes set out below.
The Humanities Conference 2003 aimed to
develop an agenda for the humanities in an
era otherwise dominated by scientific,
technical and economic rationalisms.
The conference’s conversations ranged
from the broad and speculative to the
microcosmic and empirical. Its over-riding
concern, however, was to redefine the
human and mount a case for the
humanities. At a time when the dominant
rationalisms are running a course that
often seems to be drawing them towards
less than satisfactory ends, this conference
reopened the question of the human for
highly pragmatic as well as redemptory
reasons.
To the world outside of education and academe, the humanities seems at best ephemeral, and at worst
esoteric. They appear to be of less significance and practical ‘value’ than the domains of economics,
technology and science. This conference series examines, and exemplifies, the inherent worth of the
humanities.
Papers ranged across a wide range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics,
Communication, English, Fine Arts, Geography, Government, History, Journalism, Languages, Linguistics,
Literature, Media Studies, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and Religion. Central conference considerations
included: the dynamics of identity and belonging; governance and politics in a time of globalism and
multiculturalism; and the purpose of the humanities in an era of contested ends.
Theme 1: Globalism and Identity Formation
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The dynamics of identity and belonging.
Cosmopolitanism, globalisation and backlash.
The humanities and the construction of place
First nations and indigenous peoples in first, third and other
worlds.
Human movement and its consequences: immigration, refugees,
diaspora, minorities.
Ecological sustainability, cultural sustainability, human
sustainability.
Homo faber: the human faces of technology.
Global/local, universal/particular: discerning boundaries.
Differences: gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, race,
class.
Theme 2: The Modern and the Postmodern
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Defining the modern against its ‘others’.
The postmodern turn.
Nationalism, ethnonationalism, xenophobia, racism, genocide: the ‘ancient’ and the modern.
Governance and politics in a time of globalism and multiculturalism.
The causes and effects of war.
Metropolis: the past and future of urbanism.
Geographies of the non-urban and remote in the era of total globalisation.
Theme 3: The ‘Human’ of the Humanities
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The human, the humanist, the humanities.
What is history?
The philosophy of ends or the end of
philosophy?
Anthropology, archaeology and their
‘others’.
The work of art in an age of mechanical
reproduction.
Literary-critical: changing the focal points.
Ways of meaning: languages, linguistics,
semiotics.
Theme 4: Future Humanities, Future Human
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Science confronts humanity.
Humanities teaching in higher education: fresh approaches and future prospects.
Schooling humanities: introducing history, social studies, philosophy, language, literature and the
humanities to children.
Technologies in and for the humanities.
The purpose of the humanities in an era of contested ends.
The humanities in the ‘culture wars’: questions of ‘political correctness’ and the cultural ‘canon’.
Keynote speakers
The opening keynote address was presented by Giorgos Tsiakalos, Professor at
the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and President of the Nicos Poulantzas
Society. Focusing on the relationship between the humanities and the natural
sciences, he reminded the audience that there has been a long interest in
exploring the biological bases of human behaviour, both from within the sciences
and within the humanities. While scientists do not always know how their work will
be taken up in relation to social issues, humanities scholars have been more
attuned to the social impacts of the sciences and humanisitic enquiry. He pointed
as an example to American sociobiologist E.O. Wilson’s new book, which tries to
bring together social science, humanities, biology and other sciences. Wilson
argues that xenophobia is natural, yet it was honoured by the Humanities
Association and the Philosophy Association in the USA in 1999. Because such work can quickly make its
way into mainstream debates, law and politics it is dangerous and needs to be countered by the
humanities. The humanities urgently need to address the new synthesis of biology and humanism in the
form of biotechnology, which has the capacity to extend scienticly-produced
risks across time and space as never before.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak began by reminding the conference that one of
the most significant applications of sociobiology has been to reframe
women’s experience in terms of masculine scientific knowledge systems. The
humanities, she proposed, do not derive their power from a privileged access
to some essential humanness, but from their capacity to train the imagination. ‘Reading the literary’, she
stated, ‘exercises the imagination to go towards the other’. Instruction in the humanities in themselves will
not lead to ‘good’ politics or instill ‘good’ values, since these things are invariably contested and need to
be taught self-consciously. She proposes expanding comparative literary studies, which she believes is
overly Eurocentric, by integrating such studies more in the field of area studies. She scoffed at a claim
made by Derrida and Habermas in May 2003 that Europe had developed a reflexivity about international
power (that was presumably lacking in the USA) because of its experience of colonialism. European
humanities scholars should not become so complacent about their own countries’ role in world affairs, she
warned, suggesting that such smugness paralled the debates underway between the EU and the US as to
who is best at ‘the empire game’. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the
Humanities at Columbia University, where she teaches English and the Politics of Culture.
Nikos Papastergiadis discussed how humanities scholars in
Australia had been sidelined during ‘the new authoritanarianism’.
While the Australian government was turning away refugees and
claiming that they posed a risk to national security in the wake of
September 11, humanist critics were being criticised for their ‘blackarmband view of history’ by the government and conservative
commentators. As public servants were silenced, a battle was played
out in the domestic media and the government largely succeeded in
depersonalising refugees as ‘asylum seekers’, ‘queue-jumpers’,
‘potential terrorists’ and ‘potentially-diseased’. Without independent
access to the refugees or their experience, the Australian public was
unable to ‘imagine the other’ in ways that would foster humanistic compassion and understanding. Nikos
is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne.
Paul James reminded the conference that even George W. Bush
uses the language of reciprocity, god and humanity, demonstrating
the ways in which the humanities have been taken up, and emptied
out, by spin doctors of new forms of authoritarianism. Because of the
resulting hollowness of many core concepts we can no longer rely on
the humanities to deliver positive social values on their own. After the
Second World War, he argued, the humanities dissolved into
empiricism on the one hand and posmodernism on the other, and
neither of these strains has been able to provide adequate responses
to three totalising transformations that have occurred during this
period: militarism; capitalism; communications and; technoscience.
Professor James is Director of the Globalism Institute at RMIT
University, Melbourne.
Mary Kalantzis observed that all
governments are dealing with growing cultural diversity, and
corresponding calls for recognition and self-determination. In this
context, she called for governments to advocate civic pluralism and
abandon efforts at cultural formation conceived of in terms of national
identity. States should instead create opportunities for expression,
recognition and access to resources by a diverse range of groups.
States that don’t respond to diversity favourably face growing levels of
social conflict, and often respond to the challenges posed by diversity
repressively. Mary Kalantzis is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of
Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT University,
Melbourne, Australia.
Juliet Mitchell’s paper, ‘A thought on war and the brotherhood of
man’, began by noting that the humanities had split into two streams,
one text-based and the other observational, and these need to keep
in touch with one another. She then related the psychoanalytic
concern with hysteria, to the invasion of Iraq. She recounted how
from the late Nineteenth Century men suffering from the symptoms of
hysteria were described as having ‘traumatic neurosis’ and that such
diagnoses were commonly ascribed to men who survived the First
World War. The hysteric becomes fixated on early childhood trauma,
which resurfaces throughout life as new traumatic episodes take
place. The people who experienced the recent bombing in Baghdad
and other parts of Iraq will carry that trauma with them into old age.
She extended this in the last section of her paper with a discussion of
sibling rivalry (implicitly reflecting on the relationship between those
imperial siblings, the UK and USA). Juliet Mitchel is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies and
Head of Department in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Tom Nairn suggested that to talk of human nature a few
years ago was to put oneself on the early retirement list. It
has now become so fashionable that Francis Fukuyama
has devoted a recent book to the topic, The Posthuman
Future. Believeing that it is important to know your enemies,
Nairn spelled out the main themes of Fukuyama’s book.
Fukuyama argues that we cannot do without the notion of a
core human nature, which he refers to as the ‘x factor’, and
posits the existence of a ‘clear red line’ that (following
Neitzche) he believes distinguishes humans from animals.
Fukuyama argues that we must use the state to stop
blurring this line. He claims to be defending the humanities, but ignores a huge
body of literature over the past century on this topic, showing in practice little
interest in the body of knowledge that has been accumulated. While Fukuyama
is vague about the characterisitcs of this essential human nature, he does posit
that equality is a key part of the ‘x factor’. Nairn warns about the political consequences of such
essentialist thinking coming out of the USA at present, and argues that the humanities need to engage in
such debates, and one immediate step could be to suggest that diversity should be included as a key
feature of any reconception of human nature. Tom Nairn is Professor of Nationalism and Cultural Diversity
in the Globalism Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne. To mark the launch of the second edition of
Tom Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain, Joe Cox spoke about the importance the book had on her and her
colleagues.
Performance by the Aegean University Theatrical
Group
Folkloric Dance Performance, Dimoglou Theatre
Further Details
If you would like to know more about this conference, see The Humanities Conference 2003 site
(http://humanitiesconference.com/), where you can subscribe to The Humanities Conference Newsletter.
For any other inquiries, please contact Selena Papps at Common Ground Conferences
(selena.papps@commongroundconferences.com) or Christopher Ziguras at the RMIT Globalism Institute
(christopher.ziguras@rmit.edu.au).
Common Ground Conferences
PO Box 486 Altona 3018 VIC
TEL: 03 9398 8000
FAX: 03 9398 8088