Call for Session Proposals, Society of Architectural Historians, Cincinati, Ohio Annual Meeting 2008

Submitted To (January 2, 2007):
Prof. Dietrich Neumann,
General Chair of the SAH 61st Annual Meeting,
Brown University.

Event place performance:
theorizing architectural spaces in the ancient world(s)

Session Proposal for the 2008 Annual Meeting
of the Society of Architectural Historians, Cincinnati, Ohio

Ömür Harmanşah and Cassandra Mesick
Brown University

With the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities, spatiality and the processes of spatial production has been foregrounded in academic discourse. Writing on space today requires an awareness of spatial discourses in architectural history, geography, and anthropology, nourished by developments in cultural studies and critical theory. Theorizations of spatiality, however, rarely infiltrate the study of the ancient world. Such lacunae partly stem from the difficulties in weaving diverse, fragmentary bodies of historical, textual, and material evidence into coherent interpretations. Yet, archaeologists do work with the material residues in spaces, places and landscapes, and they increasingly recognize the significance of spatiality in the structuring of human engagements with the world. Architectural space is undoubtedly a vital component of a meaningfully constituted material world. Our aim in this session is to invite scholars to theorize ancient spaces, and to challenge the historiographic separations between architectural histories of the ancient and modern worlds, by opening the field to the recent paradigms in critical theory and cultural studies.

Performance and performativity provide one such flourishing field of inquiry in studies of space. We define performance as both discursive and non-discursive dispositional practices and transformative bodily acts (e.g. gestures) of embodied subjects in the social realm and the world of the everyday, where these events as meaningful acts do not necessarily carry pre-conceived structures of signification (the so-called “scripts”) but are unbound and fluid. In performance, bodies continuously materialize as potent, inexorable, spatialized and spatializing entities. This definition thus incorporates institutionalized, “extraordinary” performances such as state spectacles, public ceremonies, and festivals, as well as the micro-practices of everyday life. Both types of performances transform and reconfigure architectural spaces; as events, they both take place and mark place. Armed with new field techniques and research paradigms, archaeology offers substantial potential to explore extraordinary performances, as recently demonstrated in Archaeology of Performance: Theaters of Power, Community and Politics (Takeshi Inomata and Lawrence S. Coben, editors, 2006), and we welcome contributions that further this productive avenue of research.

Nonetheless, giving primacy to “extraordinary” performances risks retaining constructivist approaches that treat spaces as static, concrete, and passive. Instead, we suggest that spaces are interwoven with events, performances and embodied practices that reflect their continuously performed nature and their agency as extensions of human bodies, following Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception)—a position that affords new possibilities in reconsidering the spatiality of existence. We suggest that emphasizing everyday performances and foregrounding the performance and performativity of spaces rather than in spaces challenges the long-standing dichotomy between space as a “realm of stasis” and time as a “realm of dynamism,” as critiqued by Jon May and Nigel Thrift (Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, 2001) and Doreen Massey (For Space, 2005). We thus strongly invite papers that offer insight on everyday performances, spatial practices, and their relation to the (re)production of architectural spaces in any of the world’s ancient cultures. Contributions that offer new theoretical definitions of performance, place- and space-making are especially encouraged.

Event Place Performance: Co-authoring process