As a part of the conference "Concrete Anthropology", this years last Academic Hour will be a talk by Penny Harvey from The University of Manchester.

Drawing on the contrasts between stone and concrete this paper interrogates the ways in which inorganic matter assumes vitality in human affairs. Ethnographic and historical sources from Andean Peru point to an enduring fascination with the personhood of mountains and the plant like qualities of stone. However a focus on what happens to the vitality of stone when it is incorporated into a man-made synthetic material such as concrete reveals discontinuities and incommensurable vitalities. Concrete promises fixity and stabilization, but the intrinsic sociality of the aggregates (stone and sand) and the transformations effected by the life processes in which the material is always embedded, blur distinctions between the organic and the non-organic. In the hands of an artist such as Anish Kapoor, concrete offers possibilities for exploring unconformity and entropy, the qualities of soft matter that challenge the hubris of pre-determined, categorical distinctions between natural and social worlds.

The talk is open for all.