Alexander Riley, associate professor of sociology at the Bucknell University (Pennsylvania, USA) will present two of his current works at the University of Evora - Portugal.

University of Evora - Portugal
Centro Interdisciplinar de História, Culturas e Sociedades - FCT and
Departamento de Sociologia

Alexander Riley, associate professor of sociology at the Bucknell University (Pennsylvania, USA) will present two of his current works at the University of Evora - Portugal.

7th of January 2011 - 14:00-15:30

Colegio do Espirito Santo - Room 131

"Flight 93 and the Myth of America"

I am currently writing a book about the memorialization of the crash of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA on September 11, 2001.  This process is about much more than the simple facts of the plane's fatal dive; it is about the nation, its self-conception, its view of death and heroism, the role of religion and religious symbolism in American life, and cultural battles over all of those topics.  My plan is to complete the book manuscript by the end of 2010, so my trip to Portugal would fall just as I am completing the book.  This work has gotten coverage in local media, and a few short video pieces about it can be found here:  http://www.bucknell.edu/x50555.xml
and
http://www.post-gazette.com/multimedia/default.asp?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipid=4356681

7th of January 2011 - 16:00-17:30

Colegio do Espirito Santo - Room 131

"Le Mexique Fantome:  Ek-stasis, Death, and the Other"

Over the past 15 years, I have spent a considerable amount of time in Mexico, first living on the US-Mexico border for a decade as a graduate student; later visiting the country frequently because my wife's family is there.  During this time, I have reflected a great deal on the culturally Other and the nature of knowledge about the Other.  I am particularly interested in how questions of what Bourdieu calls "auto-analysis" and life narrative inevitably become entwined in this process.  Paul Ricoeur talked of "the comprehension of self by the detours of the comprehension of the other" and numerous contemporary anthropologists have explored this dialectic (Paul Rabinow and Vincent Crapanzano among the most well-known).  I root my efforts here though in another exemplar:  Michel Leiris.  The title of the talk is obviously a play on his L'Afrique fantome, his auto-ethnographic journal of the famous Dakar-Djibouti expedition in 1931-33.  In that text, and in other philosophical auto-analyses he wrote over his lifetime, he explored the relationship between the Other, death, and the pursuit of ek-stasis (in Greek, literally, displacement from a space or condition of existence).  I endeavor here to sketch out some of the basic parameters of my own relationship to Mexico and the Mexican Other.

Alexander Riley is associate professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA,.  Dr. Riley is the author of Godless Intellectuals?: The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented (Berghahn Books, 2010) and Impure Play:  Sacrality, Transgression, and the Tragic in Popular Culture and co-author (with Philip Smith) of Cultural Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2008). His current book project deals with the cultural memory of the crash of the fourth plane involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (which went down in a field in southwestern Pennsylvania after the passengers apparently tried to take the plane back from hijackers) and is tentatively titled Angel Patriots in the Sky: The Crash of United Flight 93 and the Myth of America.