This masterclass will be a two-three hour session where we will discuss the following question: 

How do people come to inhabit the worlds that they create? Conversely, how does the cosmos, in its social constitution, come to format people and shape their lives? 

In this masterclass we examine, both substantively and methodologically, the relationship between what some anthropologists imagine as ‘everyday lived experience’ and the (apparently) transcendent horizons that cosmological orders of various kinds produce – the kinds of ‘worlds’ Samuli Schielke has referred to as ‘grand schemes’. We explore this in relation to political, religious and economic horizons (e.g. the state, Hinduism, capitalism), and experiment analytically with ways in which the distinction between everyday life and transcendent orders of value is imagined in different ways by people in varying ethnographic situations.  

Holbraad has attached two papers that speak to this question and which could help the discussion (see below).

We expect that people interested in the master class write 3-5 pages of answers and ideas. Nothing you have to hand in, but to get the discussion going. ​

Should you be interested in joining the master class please RSVP to Malthe Lehrmann by email. We have room for max 10 people. 

• Paper by Samuli Schielke and Liza Debevec
• Paper by Martin Holbraad