Image – Object – Text.
Visuality, Materiality, and Knowledge Production since the 18th Century
An Interdisciplinary Workshop.
Organisation: Noémie Étienne, Claire Brizon, Sara Petrella.
Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Bern University
Over the past decades, historians of sciences have increasingly focused their attention on visual epistemology and epistemic images in different scientific areas (anthropology, botany, etc.). At the same time, the Bildwissenschaft and Visual Studies have continued to debate what images do and how they operate. The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to examine practices of knowledge production, especially those connected to the natural sciences and anthropology, since the 18th century. What are the distinctive attributes of different media – drawings, engravings, and photographs – in this context? How might we study objects and material culture both as sources and as products of the history of science?
In the 18th century, writers, scholars, and amateurs worked collaboratively to create texts and images. To give an example, the practice of drawing united artists, historians, and physicians but also diplomats, explorers, and mercenaries. The collection, classification, description, and depiction of different species (animals, plants and minerals), as well as human artifacts or “races”, supported scientific developments. The emerging field of anthropology, for instance, depended on the collections of naturalia and artificialia that served scholarly text and image productions. In Switzerland, Alexandre César Chavannes was a prime example: responsible for the collection of books and objects at the Academy Lausanne, he defined anthropology as a “general science of man” (1787). In this period books were also circulated among scholars and were placed in cabinets containing curiosities from all over the world. Finally, such collections were not static: they belonged to a network of correspondences and dynamic exchange.
The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to investigate how images and objects in all their diversity have enabled the comprehension of practices and discourses on which were built the disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, and the natural sciences. The workshop will be structured in five main parts: two mornings of duos with doctoral students and professors; a museum visit; a roundtable; a reading group, and a keynote lecture. If you would like to present your research, please send an abstract of your PhD project (300 words) to claire.brizon@ikg.unibe.ch and sara.petrella@ikg.unibe.ch before January 1st, 2018. Deadline for inscription: March 1st, 2018.
Image – Object – Text.
Visuality, Materiality, and Knowledge Production since the 18th Century
An Interdisciplinary Workshop.
Organisation: Noémie Étienne, Claire Brizon, Sara Petrella.
Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Bern University
Over the past decades, historians of sciences have increasingly focused their attention on visual epistemology and epistemic images in different scientific areas (anthropology, botany, etc.). At the same time, the Bildwissenschaft and Visual Studies have continued to debate what images do and how they operate. The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to examine practices of knowledge production, especially those connected to the natural sciences and anthropology, since the 18th century. What are the distinctive attributes of different media – drawings, engravings, and photographs – in this context? How might we study objects and material culture both as sources and as products of the history of science?
In the 18th century, writers, scholars, and amateurs worked collaboratively to create texts and images. To give an example, the practice of drawing united artists, historians, and physicians but also diplomats, explorers, and mercenaries. The collection, classification, description, and depiction of different species (animals, plants and minerals), as well as human artifacts or “races”, supported scientific developments. The emerging field of anthropology, for instance, depended on the collections of naturalia and artificialia that served scholarly text and image productions. In Switzerland, Alexandre César Chavannes was a prime example: responsible for the collection of books and objects at the Academy Lausanne, he defined anthropology as a “general science of man” (1787). In this period books were also circulated among scholars and were placed in cabinets containing curiosities from all over the world. Finally, such collections were not static: they belonged to a network of correspondences and dynamic exchange.
The aim of this interdisciplinary workshop is to investigate how images and objects in all their diversity have enabled the comprehension of practices and discourses on which were built the disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, and the natural sciences. The workshop will be structured in five main parts: two mornings of duos with doctoral students and professors; a museum visit; a roundtable; a reading group, and a keynote lecture. If you would like to present your research, please send an abstract of your PhD project (300 words) to claire.brizon@ikg.unibe.ch and sara.petrella@ikg.unibe.ch before January 1st, 2018. Deadline for inscription: March 1st, 2018.