This two-year interdisciplinary project seeks to get beyond the implicit homogenization of thought, performance and subjectivities implied by the contemporary ethos of development and globalization. It will refocus attention on practices and forms of knowledge that diverge from, challenge, entangle with, and complicate fundamental categories or apparatuses identifiable with Enlightenment. In thinking of and with 'vernacular' practices and epistemes, this seminar remains mindful of the processes by which particular categories and performances were rendered 'parochial' or 'local' by taxonomic projects of others. Implicated in contest, incorporation, translation, vernacular categories also shifted shape. We wish to consider as broadly as possible the ways in which the vernaculars were formed, change, shift and inform other practices and concerns, and remain visible, even discordant, thereafter. We wish to foreground histories that bring such discrepant, 'narrow', secreted categories to bear on an interrogation of current disciplinary norms and debates.

The first year will engage discussions around vernacular categories of Time and Value (2008-09). Both units were multiple in most societies of the past. The seminar will study these pluralities in their specific articulations - as art, music, in narrations of ritual and social import, in economic transactions and calculations. Participants might wish to explore processes through which such categories co-constituted each other, or structured relationships between ethics and economics, political and social exchanges and distribution, between facticity, numeracy and regimes of truth.

The second year (2009-2010) will discuss Body and Soul/Mind. Taking our cue from experiential and analytic categories from the global south as well as early modern European scholarship that tracks the emergence and gap between intellectual modeling and daily experience of bodily and spiritual life, we seek to better understand these overdetermined rubrics and the binaries in which they are posited. How might we write histories if we were to dispense with the inheritance of Cartesian logics? What kind of subjectivities, selfhood, health and disability might be studied from the vantage point of a history and rhetoric of possession, rather than of autonomous and embodied physicality? Might we expand histories of interiority and agency if we dissolved barriers of human and animal, of spirit and human actors and entwined being-thought?

In both years, we welcome scholars whose work explores these themes from any time period or geographical context. We hope for a collective, interdisciplinary endeavor that will animate and reinvigorate different branches of study. As in the past, senior and postdoctoral fellows from outside Rutgers will be recruited alongside faculty and graduate students from within. They will be the core participants in the weekly seminars around which intellectual and collegial exchanges will be oriented.