Stirling Lecture – Still time to book

Professor Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge, will be joining the School of Anthropology and Conservation for our annual Stirling Lecture in celebration of the University of Kent’s 50th Anniversary.

Tuesday 11th November, 6.30pm in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1

Professor Robbins will be speaking on “Where in the world are values? On how people learn morality and come to seek the good.” For modes of thinking influenced by the fact/value distinction, values are often defined as in some sense unreal.  But this leaves us the problem of accounting for how people come to define and seek the good.   Anthropologists once approached this problem by making use of the concept of culture, but this notion is not as widely accepted as it once was.  I argue here that for those who do not want to rely on models in which cultures supply values, it might be argued that values exist in the form of socially concrete exemplars or exemplary actions.  In making this argument, I define exemplars as representations that model the realization of single values in unusually full form – forms that are not common in daily life because most actions are driven by a mix of diverse value considerations.  Having established this theoretical framework, I go on to make the further argument that some persons and rituals are key social forms in which exemplary representations of values are made socially available to people.  I illustrate this argument by analyzing several persons and rituals that are important among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea. The overall aim of the paper is both to contribute to theoretical discussions about the nature of values and to explore the role of values in shaping the moral aspects of social life.

Professor Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, can be found here: http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/people/core-academic-staff/professor-joel-robbins/ His anthropological research and writing cuts across disciplines and engages in contemporary debates on ethics and morality of interest to philosophy, religion, politics and linguistics.

The Stirling Lecture will be followed by a plentiful drinks and buffet reception and so we ask that you kindly register your intention (http://doodle.com/cwp2957z2wwzqnyw) if you plan to attend as space is limited.

 

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