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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><font face="Verdana" size=2>The
Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California,
Irvine announces its First Annual Graduate Student Conference<br><br>
FRIENDS, FELLOWS, AND FORMS OF FREEDOM:<br>
PREMODERN CIVIL SOCIETIES<br><br>
Friday, November 21st, 2008, at UC Irvine Key-Note Speaker: Page
duBois, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, UC San
Diego Abstract Deadline: September 1st, 2008<br><br>
“Civil society” refers to the system of voluntary civic and social
networks that stand against the formality and force-backed structure of
the state. It includes such institutions and formations as the press,
guilds and unions, religious communities, friendships, the theatre,
schools and universities, and many other groups whose members share
interests and activities. In the seventeenth century, the phrase “civil
society” was still synonymous with political life as such; by the end of
the eighteenth century, the phrase had come to designate all those forms
of social life that are not the state. To pursue the shapes and origins
of civil society before modernity, then, is to attend to the process by
which “politics” and “society” separated from each other as distinct
spheres of human association and to imagine different forms their
relationship to each other might take.<br><br>
This conference will attempt to discover the outlines, origins, or
equivalents of “civil society” in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance
periods, in Europe and globally. Were earlier civilizations freer to
imagine more egalitarian and less restricted social relationships in the
absence of a codified civil/political distinction? At any particular
moment, is civil society characterized more by unity or by
diversity?<br>
Order or freedom? Hierarchy or equality? What effects did civil society
have on literature and art, or vice versa, and what genres (the letter,
the essay, the proverb, the comedy, the symposium, and the dialogue, as
well as guides to comportment and “civil conversation”) were specific to
it? What role did religion play in establishing networks of social
relationship? What historical events and pressures led to the separation
of civil society from the state? What role did the incorporated structure
of the medieval city play in establishing the localized economic basis of
modern citizenship, and how did the forms of “civil” citizenship interact
or compete with “political” citizenship? How did forms of education
dictate membership, participation, and modes of communication in civil
societies, and in what ways were these forms continuous or not through
periods of social, political, and religious change? How did the
institutions and iconographies of gender, marriage, friendship, family,
hospitality, gift-giving, love, labor, race, class, and nationality help
establish pre-modern civil societies or their equivalents?<br><br>
CALL FOR PAPERS:<br>
We invite all interested graduate students from any university in any
discipline to submit a one-page abstract on any topic dealing with
premodern civil societies. Please send abstracts as word documents
attached to e-mails to BOTH conference organizers, Jacob McDonie<br>
(rmcdonie@uci.edu) and Jesse Weiner (weinerj@uci.edu), by September 1st,
2008. We will notify all applicants of our decisions by September 21st,
2008. We will try to provide out-of-town participants with housing with
UCI graduate students. Please direct all inquiries to the conference
organizers.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=1>* * * * * * * * * * * *<br><br>
Note: You have received this announcement because you are affiliated with
the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (faculty member,
associate/affiliate, staff, or council), or because you requested to be
on our email announcement list. If you wish to be removed from the
list, please contact us at cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.</font><font size=2><br>
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