Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Call for papers (closed)
What does it mean to give and receive gifts? Can the gift be present and entangled in all life without being intentionally given or received?
How do recent changes and challenges in technology, genetics, politics, and bioethics affect our understanding of the gift? To what extent and why does the language of the gift matter today in our present moment, and can alternative, non-conventional notions mobilized by the term “gift” disrupt the ubiquitous strand of twentieth-century gift theory?
Stemming from discoveries and insights in anthropology, history of ideas, new materialism, and bioethics, we invite scholars to rethink and revitalize the “gift” from Marcel Mauss to AI embracing the free play of multiple meanings that this concept entails.
Acknowledging the dangers of colonizing the gift by twentieth-century Western intellectuals, we aim to liberate it from the constraints of Western positivism, determinism, anthropocentrism, and the familiar critique of the “gift vs commodity” dichotomy. We are asking: what will happen if we consider the gift in terms of presence instead of exchange, entanglement instead of reciprocity, sharing instead of economy or debt?
The three-day conference Gifts/Presents/Presence –Meanings and Materialities is organized by the interdisciplinary project The Meanings and Workings of the Gift (Kone Foundation, 2021-2024) based at Tampere University and is due June 6-7, 2024. It will take place in the city of Helsinki, Finland, at the trendy cultural house Kaapelitehdas (an old cable factory building) and will include an exhibition curated in collaboration with Aalto University and the Academy of Fine Arts. The conference will combine traditional panels with roundtables and/or workshops.
We invite papers that address a wide range of conceptual, terminological, and pragmatic questions on the subject of the gift and/or its relation to the concepts of the present/presence from various disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Historical papers that have a theoretical dimension and refer to the current critical discussions of the gift/presence are also welcome.
The tentative topics include but are not limited to:
- the temporality of the gift/present
- the effectivity of gifts across diverse vibrant materialities
- decolonizing the gift
- rethinking Maussian concepts (“hau,” “mana,” “gift economy,” etc.)
- languages of the gift (cf. “present,” “keepsake,” “munus,” “donum,” “sacrifice,” etc.)
- queer gift theory
- non-human gifts
- digital gifts, gifts and AI
- phenomenology of receiving
- giving and/vs sharing
- gifts and/of waste/excess
- organ transplantation and the Gift of Life
- academic gifts (grants, Open access, sharing, etc.)
- poisonous gifts
- gift of death and bioethics
Photo: W 0.2 Non/living artwork featuring the artist’s vaginal epithelial cells, slug ova cell, custom incubator, silicon tube, custom borosilicate glassware. © Margherita Pevere, 2018-2019, from the series Wombs. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Photography: Sanjin Kaštelan.)