Contact Organisers

Professor Peter Ackermann
peter.ackermann*rzmail.uni-erlangen.de
(where * is replaced by the @ sign)

Dr. Bruce White
bwhite*oicd.net
(where * is replaced by the @ sign)

Social Theory in Action:

Transforming Imaginative Landscapes.

"The Glass House", Spitz, Switzerland

August 6th-7th 2007

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

Building on the 2006 OICD workshop on the subject of continuity in personal and group narratives, this year we are focusing on the role of the culture narrative in the construction of identity and how new concepts of unfixed, multi-sited, culture may have the potential to challenge the legitimacy of certain kinds of sectarian identities.

Introduction—the OICD and the Annual Workshop
The Organization for Intra-Cultural Development is a politically independent, international organization, based in Kyoto, Japan. Its principle aim is to conduct and facilitate research into the mechanisms that support (or destroy) cohesion within cultures (their constituent groups, societies, and nations). This is done with a view to utilizing this research to develop new, as well a variety of existing, real world applications. Through these two complementary activities, the OICD hopes it may directly contribute to other efforts to reduce violent and non-violent ethnic/religious/racial/inter-group conflict, and promote a concept of unity through the acknowledgment, and celebration, of a common shared social diversity.

The OICD’s annual workshop intends to bring together people, ideas and concepts with a view to developing foundational intellectual and methodological approaches to the organization’s research and project agenda. It is an opportunity to define and improve the key approaches the organization takes to understanding the individuals and groups its applications aim to affect. The workshop also operates to develop the research into real-world links and applications.

2nd Annual Workshop Theme

What kinds of social theory fuel conflict-causing identities? What kinds of social theory can potentially serve to benefit sustainable imagined community building? While the workshop is open to the consideration of many kinds of social theories and examples, there is a special consideration of the role of Culture Theory in the production and maintenance of conflict-causing communities.

Anthropologists have traditionally taken the responsibility of helping to make the concept of culture relevant and meaningful to the general public. Since the end of World War II, anthropologists can perhaps be said to have been partially successful in propagating a vision of culture that has largely done away with the prejudices of the 19th century, allowing, at the very least, a relative respect for other cultures and a reduction in ethnocentrism.

However, the notion of culture propagated since the 1940s has not changed fundamentally, and sits, firmer than ever, in the minds of billions of people, defining their inner and outer worlds, their relationships, responses and interactions with one another. The culture theory of the 40s is still that applied to notions of human rights, and is still at the basis of many efforts to understand, defuse, resolve and prevent conflicts around the world.

Despite an outpouring of social research since the 1990s which collectively points to the inadequacies of current Cultural Theory in explaining the myriad ways in which individuals find and express their identities, there have been few attempts to structure a formal, widely digestible, alternative. The fact that current cultural theory does not allow us to understand how individuals live out “multi-sited”, rather than, “culturally-bound” identities, is perhaps is largest and most problematic weakness. The inherent inaccuraries in the current theory lead to fractures in the playing out of cross-cultural group relationships. Because little space exists to acknowledge the multi-sitedness of human expression, narratives are spun within in a climate of legitimized and accepted cultural symbolism. In such a climate, conflict is easily embarked upon as a mode of alternative expression.

Here, then, we are interested in understanding how new culture theory may be put into action, to both complement and enrich the accepted modes of inter-group dialogue and expression. What new possibilities do these ideas of multi-sited identity bring to the table? How can we work make them better known and understood? What old limitations await such efforts to expand the expressive repertoire?

Workshop Format

The annual OICD workshop is an informal and friendly event which attempts to encourage a wide variety of discussion from young and older people, professional academics, students and the general public.

The first day of the two-day conference will invite up to 5 academic speakers to make presentations and to put forward ideas and research findings. The second day shall be devoted to discussing and integrating these ideas and findings into composite theories and working models for projects and further research. This year, as was the case in 2006, we shall request input from many young students in this latter phase.

Access

The nearest large town to Spitz is Berne. The nearest large international airport is Zurich, followed by Geneva. The workshop shall be held in a large glass house on the lake. Please contact one of the organizers to arrange your arrival at the venue.

The Organisation for Intra-Cultural Development (OICD)