Seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów 26.04.2023 g.15:00
W środę 26 kwietnia 2023 o godz. 15:00 odbędzie się kolejne spotkanie w ramach seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów.
Gościć będziemy profesor Kirsten Hastrup.
The Life of Anthropology: A Personal Travelogue through Fifty Years.
In this presentation, we shall make a brief tour through the kinds and shapes of anthropology that I have known and practiced for over half a century of practicing it.
I shall pay particular interest in the major shifts that I have met with, from the early views of Malinowski and his generation, onwards towards later trends in British anthropology, and a later trend of historical anthropology.
From there I shall move towards newer trends and modern concerns of the continued value of the ‘old’ discipline – at the time of internet communication, and new national and political uncertainties and upheavals.
I shall end on a positive note, based on my own experience and the optimism that comes with new generations.
Prof. Kirsten Hastrup
University of Copenhagen
Professor of anthropology. She has taken a special interest in the conjunction between the history and culture of both Iceland and Greenland, publishing widely on both, while also examining the relationship between the theatre and anthropology.
She studied geography and biology at Aarhus University. She went on to study ethnography at Copenhagen University, receiving an M.Sc. in 1973. The following year, she was awarded the university’s gold medal for researching woman’s place in anthropology.
She joined the staff of Aarhus University in 1976. She learnt Icelandic and studied the country’s history, taking a special interest in the Middle Ages. With the agreement of Oxford, she wrote her thesis on Cultural Classification and History with Special Reference to Medieval Iceland (1979), earning a doctorate in 1980. The same year, her work led to the creation of historical anthropology as a new university subject in Denmark.
In 1982, she travelled to Iceland, where she spent half a year at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies where she comprehensively researched Iceland’s history. She published her findings as Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400–1800 which ultimately earned her a second doctorate as dr.scient.soc or doctor of social sciences from the University of Copenhagen in 1990.
She spent a further period carrying out fieldwork on a farm and in a fishing village in Iceland, examining the relationship between social history and cultural identity. Her work was documented in a trilogy covering Culture and History (1985), Nature and Policy (1990) and A Place Apart (1998). Hastrupalso initiated a larger, two-year research project which led to the publication of Den nordiske verden (The Nordic World) in 1992.
From 1985 to 1990, Hastrup was a professor of research at Aarhus University where her work focused on the relationship between the theatre and anthropology. In 1990, she was appointed professor at the University of Copenhagen where she continued her interest in theatre, arranging a large conference on theatre anthropology. Her interest in the relationship between human structures and the process of change resulted in her appointment as the first head of research at the Danish Centre for Human Rights in 1998. This, in turn, led to her presidency of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters from April 2008 to June 2016.
From 2009 to 2014, Prof. Hastrup ran Waterworlds, a major European research project analysing social responses to climate change, followed by fieldwork in Greenland, where she researched the effects of the modern world on a small community of hunters.
From July 2014, she was PI of a new project, jointly funded by the Velux Foundations and the Carlsberg Foundation called The NOW Project: Living Resources and Human Societies around the North Water in the Thule Area, NW Greenland. In addition to anthropologists, the project involved archaeologists and biologists. Her previous work in the region continued here in a concerted, cross-disciplinary effort to understand the long-term development of the resource space shared by humans and animals under shifting climatic conditions. Both of these research efforts have resulted in numerous publications.
These regional studies have contributed vastly also to her general theoretical and methodological interests, now centringon the entanglement of natural and social processes. This is reflected also in her teaching, where most recently she is involved in the Environmental Anthropology course and Arctic anthropology modules.
Prof. Hastrup is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
She has published some 40 books including:
(1998). A Place Apart: An Anthropological Study of the Icelandic World. Clarendon Press.
(2004). Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare. Museum Tusculanum Press.
(2013). Anthropology and Nature. Routledge
(2014). Living with Environmental Change: Waterworlds. Routledge.