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Stephen Hugh-Jones

Name: Stephen Hugh-Jones
Start: 2024-01-27T19:30:00+00:00
Location: Presteigne Assembly Rooms

0	PRESTEIGNE: Mid Border Arts at The Assembly Rooms
P	Saturday 27th January, 2024
N	7:30pm

Event information

Anthropologist Stephen Hugh Jones will join us for a talk based on his academic paper about a NW Amazonian Indian myth -‘The Spirit with no anus and the pots that fart. Adventures in the mythology of the Colombian Amazon and why this is of relevance to ourselves.’

A complex set of philosophical ideas lie behind this funny, scatological tale.

To understand what the story is really about, one has to unpick the indigenous peoples’ sophisticated knowledge of the natural world on which it is based. Once the story is understood, it turns out that it is not far removed from various cultural themes familiar to ourselves - religious ideas about death, rebirth, and eternity; Freudian psychology about anality and orality; carnivals and carnivalesque behaviour; grottoes and the grotesque in art; ideas about creation and creativity associated with pottery…