<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>The Waterless Sea: A Cultural and Political History
of Mir</title></head><body>
<div>The Waterless Sea: A Cultural and Political History of Mirages -
public talk by Christopher Pinney anthropologist | Christopher Pinney
| <a
href=
"https://www.ikon.hu/artroll/index?search=e_id&search_string=15470"
>Visual Studies Platform (VSP) at CEU</a><br>
</div>
<div>megnyitó | 2019. február 19. 17:30<br>
</div>
<div
>https://vsp.ceu.edu/events/2019-02-19/waterless-sea-cultural-and-pol<span
></span>itical-history-mirages-public-talk-christopher</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>cím | CEU 1051 Nádor utca 13. Gellner Room</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><x-tab>
</x-tab><i>Visual Studies Platform cordially invites you to the public
talk 'The Waterless Sea: A Cultural and Political History of Mirages'
by Christopher Pinney (anthropologist, art historian, Professor of
Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London.)</i><br>
</div>
<div><x-tab> </x-tab>Fata
morgana have long astonished travellers, and "waterless seas" have
beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Complex cultural histories long
predate the first English usage of the term "mirage" in 1800.
Chinese and Japanese poetry and images depicted fata morgana as
exhalations of clam-monsters, whereas Arab, Persian and Indian sources
related "inferior" mirages to the "thirst of gazelles", a
metaphor for the nullity of desire. Mirages have been observed
wherever there have been sufficient temperature gradients to generate
the necessary refraction. This talk focuses chiefly on eastern or
"Oriental" mirages that frequently conjoin the desert, Islam and the
Ottoman Empire. These emblematize the antithesis of Tocquevillean
"spectatorial democracy" in which politics was positively correlated
with transparency. Islam exemplified an occlusion of which the mirage
became a negative, but also enchanted, emblem (on first seeing the
Kaaba in Mecca Richard Burton refers to "the mirage medium of
Fancy"). The conclusion explores the way in which recent fata morgana
(eg ones seen in Guandong in 2015) feed into modern conspiracy
theories that repeat the clash between "spectatorial democracy"
and its occluded other. Finally, the philosophical importance of
mirages, which are "real" but not "true", is explored.<br>
</div>
<div><x-tab>
</x-tab>Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual
Culture at University College London. He is the author of Camera
Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997) and 'Photos of
the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (2008),
both published by Reaktion.<br>
</div>
<div><x-tab> </x-tab>The
event is organized withing the framework of the University-Wide Course
Memory Frames and a re co-hosted by the VSP.</div>
</body>
</html>