Reading Kenneth White. Anthropoetry/anthropoiesis, experiencing the  earth and the living

| November 21-22, 2024, Maison SHS (CY Cergy Paris Université, France) / Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie

Organizers : Peggy Pacini, Anne-Marie Petitjean(CY Cergy Paris Université, UMR Héritages) and Gérald Peloux (INALCO, IFRAE / CRCAO)

In the wake of our first conference on making anthropology resonate in contemporary poetry, this sequel would like to continue the stimulating exchanges and the dialogue between these two fields looking at the work (poetry and essays) of poet Kenneth White (1936-2023). Born in Scotland, rooted in Brittany, this “intellectual nomad” traveled the world and wrote extensively, conceptualizing a universal poetics / a poetics of the universal. His thought, writing and work journey into territories and cultures to offer an experience, which is altogether poetic and anthropological.

“All cultures are incomplete (…) each one insists on one or two aspects of the human potentiality (…) and to come up with a somewhat exhaustive notion of culture, one should ‘nomadize’ around the world from one culture to the next” (K. White). Kenneth White is a poet, not an anthropologist nor an ethnologist per se. Yet his work is an invitation to examine his academic life and poetry and essays with an anthropo(i)etic critical eye. As such the field of contemporary research-creation which considers the literary creative process as a mode of enquiry is one that we would also like to be explored in this conference. In 2006, Michele Duclos suggested White’s work and thought be looked at from the perspective of his journey into the world’s cultures and from a new ‘nomadic’ anthropology. Almost a year now since he passed away, a considerable body of poetry and critical thinking is left for us to consider. What is it that his work is telling us on our Western society and culture? How does it resonate with our own fields of research? How does his poetic and theoretical work invites a critical examination of the porosity and shift of the dialogue between fields of research and the attempt to find and conceptualize new fields to speak of these possible contacts and the fluid circulation between disciplines.

The “open field” some American poets (Whitman, Emerson, Jeffers, and Snyder), for instance, offered White was a perfect space to develop a thought-praxis, a poetry which followed in the footsteps of a literary and philosophical heritage, while allowing him to open his own road with a free ontological thought. And to fill the gaps the poets he admired had left, he developed his own concepts and founded the field of geopoetics.

The conference invites proposals on the following topics, but not exclusively:

• tropisms and concepts in White’s work: the white world, whiteness, space, energy; nomadism, wandering, intellectual nomadism; cosmic consciousness; nordicity
• converging fields and academic territories, changing the categories, archipelagic thoughts: thinking the state of the human being in the universe, the relationship between human being and planet Earth; writing the landscape, the world, sentient beings and things; writing the relationship between thought, body and the world; being in / to the world; regrounding
• poiesis as presence-in-the-world, the experience of field and territory, the cosmological poetics of the universe, aesthetic experience of being-in-the-world
• the phenomenological dimensions of language; language as relational, as experience; the poetic word, thought; the work “analogue”; the poem-meditation; the grammar of rocks
• nature and culture, the relationship to the non-human, the archaic, the primitive, shamanism, the sacred, otherness, cosmology.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Ullrich Kockel, Professor of Creative Ethnology, University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), UK.

Proposals (in French or in English) are to be sent to: Peggy Pacini (peggy.pacini@cyu.fr), AMarie Petitjean (anne-marie.petitjean@cyu.fr) and Gérald Peloux (geraldpeloux@gmail.com) until August 25, 2024. Online proposals will also be examined.

Bibliography:

https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/ / https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/en 

https://www.larevuedesressources.org/-Kenneth-White-.html 

Nathalie Blanc, « De l’esthétique environnementale à la recherche création », Nouvelle revue d’esthétique, vol. 22, n.° 2, 2018, p. 107-117.

Rachel Bouvet & Kenneth White (dir.), Le nouveau territoire. L’exploration géopoétique de l’espace, Montréal, Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire, coll. « Cahiers Figura », 2008.

Geertz Clifford, Works and Lives: the Anthropologist as Author, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988.

Richard Conte, “Recherche et création”, Filozofski vestnik, vol. XX, n° 2, 1999-XIV ICA Supplement, p. 303-315. 

Hymes Dell, “Anthropology and poetry,” Dialectical Anthropology, vol. 11, n°°2/4, 1986, p. 407-410.

Michèle Duclos, Le Monde ouvert de Kenneth White, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1995.

Michèle Duclos, Kenneth White, nomade intellectuel, poète du monde, Ulga, 2006.

Violaine Houdart-Merot & AMarie Petitjean, La Recherche-création littéraire, Peter Lang, 2021. 

Ullrich Kockel, “Liberating the Ethnological Imagination,” Ethnologia Europaea: Journal of European Ethnology, vol. 38, n° 1, 2008, p. 8-12.

Kateri Lemmens, Alice Bergeron & Guillaume Dufour Morin, Explorer, créer, bouleverser. L'essai littéraire comme espace de recherche-création, Nota bene, La ligne du risque, 2019.

Tony McManus, The Radical Field, Kenneth White and Geopoetics, Dingwall, Sandstone Press, 2007.

Kent Maynard & Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, “Anthropology at the Edge of Words: Where Poetry and Anthropology Meet.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 35, n° 1, 2010, p. 2–19.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945.

René Passeron, Pour une philosophie de la création, Klincksieck, 1989.

Milhai Popa, The Anthropology of Poiesis, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.

Régis Poulet, “Du mandala à l’atopie : l’expérience humaine extrême de Kenneth White”

Régis Poulet, “Kenneth White de l’Alaska au Hokkaido : l’Idée du Nord”

Miles Richardson, “Writing Poetry and Doing Ethnography: Aesthetics and Observation on the Page and in the Field.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 19, n° 1, 1994, p. 77­-87.

Christophe Roncato, Kenneth White, une œuvre-monde, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, collection Plurial, Rennes, 2014.

Kenneth White, “Le grand champ de la géopoétique” 

Kenneth White, “Éléments de géopoétique”

Kenneth White, Scènes d’un monde flottant, Grasset, 1983.

Kenneth White, L’Esprit nomade, Grasset, 1985.

Kenneth White, Le Plateau de l’Albatros, introduction à la géopoétique, essais, Grasset, 1994.

Kenneth White & Jorge Camacho, La Danse du chamane sur le glacier, L’instant perpétuel, 1996.

Kenneth White, Le Lieu et la Parole : entretiens 1987-1997, Ed. du Scorff, 1997.

Kenneth White, The Wanderer and his Charts: Essays on Cultural Renewal, 2004.

Kenneth White, Un Monde ouvert: Anthologie personnelle, Gallimard, 2007 / Open World:The Collected Poems 1960 – 2000, Tostada Speaks Book Blo., 2010.

Kenneth White, Investigation dans l’espace nomade, Isolato, 2014.

Kenneth White, Les Vents de Vancouver, Le mot et le reste [nouvelle édition], 2014 / The Winds of Vancouver: A Nomadic Report from the North Pacific Edge, Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, 2013.

Kenneth White, Panorama géopoétique - théorie d’une textonique de la Terre, Editions de la Revue des ressources, 2014.

Kenneth White, Le Gang du Kosmos, Wildproject, 2015.

Kenneth White, Au large de l’Histoire, Le mot et le reste, 2015.

Kenneth White, Un Monde à part, Éditions Héros-limite, 2015.

Kenneth White, La Figure du dehors, Le mot et le reste, 2015.

Kenneth White, The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume I: Underground to Otherground, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2016.

Kenneth White, La Traversée des territoires, Le mot et le reste, 2017.

Kenneth White, L’Archipel du songe, Le mot et le reste, 2018.

Kenneth White, Les Cygnes sauvages, Le mot et le reste [nouvelle édition], 2018.

Kenneth White, Territoires chamaniques : Premiers temps, espaces premiers, Éditions Héros-Limite, 2018.

Kenneth White, Gary Snyder. Biographie poétique, Wildproject, 2021.

Kenneth White & Jeff Malpas, The Fundamental Field, Edinburgh University Press, 2021.

Kenneth White, Hokusai ou l’horizon sensible : Prélude à une esthétique du monde, L'Atelier Contemporain, 2021.

Kenneth White, Le Mouvement géopoétique, Poésis, 2023.

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, « La géopoétique ou la question des frontières de l’art », Philosophique, vol. 2, 1999, p. 3-13.