Our topic for 2005 is Custom, Ritual, Habit, Fetish: The Idols of the Eighteenth Century. Religious ritual, pagan fetishes, the customs of the unwashed, the habits of the unlettered: these were the idols eighteenth-century men and women sought to cleanse from human society and culture, at times by force of conquest. Even so, it was precisely in this period that the very modes of description observers developed to represent others, they turned back on themselves, making custom, habit, and ritual into crucial elements of social and mental life. In so doing, they raised a host of questions about everyday life in the domestic sphere, habit in the operations of the mind, custom and tradition as the essence of nations, and ritual as a structure of religious belief, among others.
Wednesday 11 May
3:00
Welcome by Dean Kumble R. Subbaswamy and Fritz Breithaupt
3:30-5:00
Donna Andrew (History, University of Guelph)
"Custom makes us tyrants to ourselves": criticizing custom in
eighteenth-century England
Lori Branch (English, University of Iowa)
Spontaneity, sentiment and secularism
Commentator: Jonathan Elmer (English, IU)
Informal Dinner at the Breithaupt residence (1035 E. Maxwell Lane, 330-9903)
Thursday 12 May
10:00-12:00
Suzanne O'Brien (Modern Asian History, Loyola Marymount University)
Mastering fuzoku in eighteenth-century Japan: reforming, reviving and
recording customs in public discourse
Janet Sorensen (English, IU)
Provincial glossaries, popular antiquities, and the phantom cultures of
Britishness
Celestina Wroth (History, IU)
"Not absolutely a native, nor entirely a stranger": interrogating our
sources for "folk" religion in 18th century Britain
Commentator: Deidre Lynch (English, IU)
Restaurant Lunch
Bombay House @ 4th Street
2:00-3:30
Jonathan Sheehan (History, IU)
The altars of the idols: communication, distinction, and the early modern
polity
Marcus Twellmann (German, Johns Hopkins University)
"As the negroes of Guinea take an oath on their fetish": Kant and the
imaginary of obligation
Commentator: Fritz Breithaupt (German, IU)
4:00-5:30
Plenary Address
Jonathan Lamb (English, Vanderbilt)
Still life and The Rape of the Lock
Friday 13 May
Morning free for reading
10:30-12:30
Sunil Agnani (English, Princeton Society of Fellows)
Custom, prejudice and manners: Edmund Burke between France and India in
1790
Isaac Land (History, Texas A & M University-Commerce)
Moral thermometers and bad habits: medical ethnographies of drunkenness
Bridgett Williams-Searle (History, College of St. Rose, NY)
The ancient customs of this place: settlers, subalterns and competing
legalities in post-colonial America, 1778-1800
Commentator: Linda Charnes (English, IU)
individual lunch
2:30-4:00
Martin Kagel (German, University of Georgia)
Others and selves: rituals of friendship in eighteenth-century Germany
Julie Park (English, McMaster University)
"And these things are very various": fetishism, fiction and fashion in the
age of Enlightenment
Commentator: Michel Chaouli (German, IU)
4:30-6:00
Plenary Address
Robert Markley (English, UI, Champaign/ Urbana)
Down and out in Indostan: the British, Aurangzeb, and the limits of the postcolonial past
6:30 Festive Banquet Tallent
Saturday 14 May
10:00-12:00
Susan Manning (English, University of Edinburgh)
Enlightened texts and decaying evidence
Tobias Menely (English, IU)
Rural customs and sentimental modernity: hunting, history, and the British
Georgic
Jane Slinn (English, Cambridge University)
Is "custom the sole principle of beauty"?
David Hume, Adam Smith, and the place of custom in judgments of taste
Commentator: Nick Williams (English, IU)
12:00-1:00
Workshop summary
Discussion opened by Constance Furey (Religious Studies, IU)
1:00 Catered Lunch