RAM Talk: Dialogue: Synchronicity in Anthropology and Psychology
Sep 16, 2017 Saturday 19:30 - 21:00
Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai 20 Huqiu Road, Huangpu District)
In the early twentieth century, anthropologists turned their research attention from diachronic to synchronic approaches, with the original theories of evolutionism and diffusionism replaced by functionalism, structural-functionalism and structuralism. Inspired by Ferdinant de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, and the Prague School, Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist and master of structuralism, conducted comparative studies on kinship and mythology, bringing the synchronic studies on anthropology to a new prominence. Despite that he was criticized for his theory of the unconscious foundations of structure, he had made significant contributions to anthropology, such as the idea of structural transformations which has radically changed anthropologists’ approaches to studying society and culture. In terms of psychology, Jacques Lacan introduced modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics into psychoanalytic theory and applied Freud's psychoanalytic theory to linguistics, proposing that “the unconscious is structured like a language”. So, what kind of conversation will an anthropologist and a psychologist have regarding the theme of “synchronicity”?
Dr. Chen Jin, Ph.D. in social anthropology/ethnology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in France, lecturer at the Department of Sociology in the School of Political Science and International Relations, Tongji University, and a Visiting Scholar of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences in Zhejiang University (2017-2018). His research interests include rituals, cultural cognition and space-time structure.
Dr. Ju Fei, Lacanian psychoanalyst and Ph.D. in psychoanalysis at Paris Diderot University, and now serves as an Associate Professor of Psychology at Tongji University and a part-time MA student adviser of Applied Psychology at Fudan University.
Free admission, reservation is required.