workshop 1

Geoffrey Lloyd (Needham Research Institute, Cambridge) - Response to the afternoon’s papers and discussion

Interestingly, Geoffrey Lloyd’s questions and comments posed in the response to the first  day of workshops’ presentations and debates corresponded directly to the themes of the upcoming Experimentality programme. Lloyd’s arguments can be classed in five separate but interrelated categories.

Stephanie Koerner (University of Manchester) opened her presentation by arguing that until quite recently very few historians are likely to been receptive to the suggestion that materials hitherto eclipsed by canonical accounts of art, science and modernity might have very direct bearing upon challenges posed by changes taking place in the dynamics of research and teaching institutions, and wider public affairs.

 Stephen Pumfrey (History, Lancaster University) opened his paper by suggesting an exercise. He asked the participants to add one word to the phrase ‘An Experimental Christian…’. All the chosen words were nouns (music, art, ethics or other) and Pumfrey illustrated how the same phrase in early books of 1700 was itself treated as a noun, suggesting a different meaning and understanding of the term ‘experimental’. 

Discussion following the first panel of the workshop (Homo experimentalis) was oriented around five main themes.

Christina Toren (Anthropology, University of St. Andrews) opened her presentation by explaining that as a form of experiment, ethnography demands a great deal of us because, properly done, it leads us inexorably to questioning our fundamental understandings of the world and human beings and thus to a re-thinking of the analytical categories that inform the human sciences.

Robin Skeates (Archaeology, University of Durham) presented his talk in two parts. Part 1, 'From experimental archaeology to experimenting with archaeology', looked at some of the different ways in which 'experimentality' has been understood and used by archaeologists. Part 2, ‘Experimentation in prehistory’ was a speculative attempt to consider experimentation in prehistory, with reference to Skeates’s own research on social and material lives of prehistoric people in the Central Mediterranean region.

In the opening session of the workshop, Michael Krätke and Bronislaw Szerszynski welcomed participants, thanked those who had helped make the programme possible, and introduced its themes and questions.