The 4th Lévi-Strauss Memorial Lecture will be presented by Ramon Sarró on 21 October

Each year, the Lévi-Strauss Memorial Lecture, organised by the journal L'Homme in association with an international scientific committee, singles out an anthropologist whose research is currently receiving wide comparative attention in the discipline.

These events, funded by Éditions de l'EHESS, EHESS, LAS, LESC and Héritages, bring together researchers and students from many institutions beyond anthropology. Previous speakers are Aparecida Vilaça (National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Vinciane Despret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Heonik Kwon (University of Cambridge).

This year, we are delighted to announce that the 4th Lévi-Strauss Memorial Lecture will be presented by Ramon Sarró, social anthropologist, here at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.

Time and place
3pm (local time), 21 October 2021
Campus Condorcet, Centre des Colloques, Auditorium 250, Paris

Title: 'The way of the prophets: History, structure and imagination in Africa (“la voie des prophètes: Histoire, structure et imagination en Afrique”)'

Abstract: What is prophetic imagination? How can some individuals propose models of society and universe that others accept as possible and desirable? Starting from an ethnography of prophetism in the Kongo region of Central Africa, and drawing comparisons with other West African prophets, this lecture will listen to the voice of prophecy, as Ardener invited. In doing so, as the comparative enterprise expands, as new concepts emerge and as the relationship between structural considerations and event processes is reconfigured, we cannot avoid following the path of prophecy, inspired by our forebears who have followed other paths... (NB: the lecture, in French, will play with the pun of voix, voice, pronounced very much like voie, path, thus bringing Ardener’s “voice of prophecy” and Lévi-Strauss “ways of the masks” together…)

Ramon Sarró's lecture will be introduced by Marie-Nathalie LeBlanc, professor at the Université du Québec, Montréal.

Please note that a health pass will be required at the entrance. The event will be followed by a cocktail.

https://www.facebook.com/events/400713054764003