What Does Ropemaking Has to do With Active Matter?

We were very happy to invite to our »Talking Matters« lecture on October 11th as an on-site event in the Sophienstraße. With our guest César Enrique Giraldo Herrera, Social Anthropologist from the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, we had an inspiring discussion about »Winding intentionalities and the harmony of ropes«.

The lecture was given in English. It was part of the lecture series of the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity« entitled Talking Matters.

Abstract

Through this talk we explored early precedents to the history of active matter. We examined how ropemaking was associated with magic, rope was understood to be a creature, and how rope metaphors lay at the basis of philosophical understandings of intentionality. Thereby, we questioned formalistic and disembodied understandings of intentionality. Then, through fieldwork with rope-making apprentices, we enquired into a craft that repurposes and thereby affords a deep practical understanding of the internal microstructures and dynamics of vegetable and animal bodies. This craft articulates a material understanding of harmony and thereby of the mind, of how energy is stored and transformed in internal tensions, constituting forms of memory that have to be addressed and neutralised to make rope functional. We explored how intentionality and harmony can be understood as properties that emerge from physical interactions, make bodies coalesce and further interact, extending causality beyond deterministic laws towards a widespread interpenetrating sociality.

CV

Dr. César Enrique Giraldo Herrera is a biologist and PhD in social anthropology. He is an independent researcher and author. He has been a Senior Scientist with the Development and Knowledge Sociology Working Group at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT). Previously, he was a stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, affiliated with the Institute for Science Innovation and Society (InSIS), School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME), University of Oxford. Earlier he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iceland. His work explores how humans and other beings relate with and through marine environments, their bodies, microbes, technology, music and dreams. He is the author of »Microbes and other Shamanic Beings« (Palgrave, 2008) and »Ecos en el arrullo del mar: Las artes de la marinería en el Pacífico colombiano y sy mimesis en la música y el baile« (Uniandes, 2009).

Registration
No prior registration was required. The event took place as an on-site event in the Central Laboratory of the Cluster »Matters of Activity« at Sophienstraße 22a (2nd floor) in Berlin-Mitte.