[presentation slides]
a workshop presentation at
Weary Worlding: Anthropology, Performance and the Spectre of Radical Alterity
29 September 2025
Oriel College
University of Oxford
Curated by Lindsey Drury and Jonas Tinius
Funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership
In the years since Baudrillard’s Radical Alterity (1994), there has been a broad interdisciplinary debate about the idea of the nature-culture spectrum as composed of epistemological and/or ontological differences so severe that we may need to address the “incommensurability” of worlds (Povinelli 2001). Indeed, as David Graeber put it in his essay “radical alterity is just another way of saying reality”, in such a case, for any who “claimed to have a message for all humanity, the response would presumably be to tell her to pipe down and speak for herself” (2015: 8).
This interdisciplinary discussion has drawn on traditions in anthropology, art history, philosophy, and performance studies, to name but a few, and we wish to bring together some of these strands of thought to problematise the spectre of radical alterity through the lens of anthropology and performance. A spectre can appear as much from the past as from the future – it is a frightening apparition, a warning, or haunting. However conceptualised, itreturns or breaks through into the present as an unwanted trace. In the case of radical alterity, the promise of cultural difference as a critique of Western universalism is counterbalanced by the return of political nativism and identitarian essentialism. How do we address, thus, the spectre of radical alterity in our works? Where does it come from in each case? What path does it lead us down?
More specifically, we wish to historicise the debate and contextualise it in the case studies of lab participants, asking, among other things: How have performance archives (understood in a broad sense) enabled the theorisation of other “epistemological worlds”? How can scholarship on the history of performance speak to anthropological concerns with the (de)construction of sameness and difference? What can anthropology do for working through archives of anthropological differences that is relevant for theatre, performance, and dance scholars? How, in our collection of materials and address of histories, do we deal with and de/re/categorizeconcepts of “sameness” or “identity”?
In this one-day lab, participants draw from their research to grapple with the impacts of the concept of radical alterity, and its role as a thoroughfare of discourse between the arts and anthropology. We are asking participants to bring (real) work-in-progress and questions that we can address collectively. We therefore would like to invite participants to bring case studies for which there will be ample time for discussion.