Witnessing and Stewardship: Reflections on Living with the Dead – A Closing Panel

At this final event in the Living with the Dead series we reflect on the politics and ethics of respectful engagement with the past. We interrogate the role of those who bear witness as outsiders to traditions of connecting with and honouring the dead, and consider what this means for the conflicted ethic of stewardship that so often informs our relations with the past and the ancestors of others. As philosophers, one of us (Sylvia Berryman) approaches this as the co-convener of a Guatemala-based seminar on social theory who over several years has been witness to Indigenous conversations about those who have died or been disappeared in recent political violence. The other (Alison Wylie) brings to bear the lens of a philosopher of science who has been party to debates about an archaeological ethic of stewardship that throws into especially sharp relief contentious questions about the politics of cultural appropriation, how conflicting interests in the past are to be mediated, and what joint or collaborative modes of stewardship might have to offer. Our aim in presenting our reflections on the series and our views on witnessing and stewardship is to open up discussion that anticipates the MOA exhibition that is the culmination of this series.

 

Sylvia Berryman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UBC, and Co-Director UBC Global Citizenship Term Abroad. She has written on the intersections between ancient Greek natural philosophy and natural sciences, including mechanics, medicine, optics, physics and theory of mixture. Although she has written on topics ranging over the entire period of Greek antiquity, many individual research papers concern the role of Hellenistic science on natural philosophy, especially that of the Aristotelian school. This culminated in a 2009 monograph on the impact of ancient Greek mechanics on ideas about causation and explanation of the natural world. More recently, she has been writing on the metaethical foundations of Aristotle's ethics, especially the role of naturalism in his thought and the recent situationist critique of virtue ethics. Sylvia is currently writing a book on Aristotle's metaethics. In addition, she has interests in questions of ethics and global poverty.

 

Alison Wylie is Professor of Philosphy at UBC. She works primiarly on epistemic and ethical questions raised by research practice in the social and historical sciences: What counts as evidence? Are ideals of objectivity viable given the central role that contextual values play in all aspects of inquiry? How do we make research accountable - in its aims and its practice - to the diverse communities it affects? She is particularly interested in these issues as raised by archaeological practice and by feminist research in the social sciences. Alison is currently developing a cluser of projects on collaborative practice and feminist standpoint theory.