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Cameroon: Supervision and lecturing tour on Intercultural Philosophy, March 2005 |
Cameroun: Tour de supervision et de conférences sur la philosophie interculturelle, mars 2005 |
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One of the priorities of the chair of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, has been to create a context in which Intercultural Philosophy may be pursued in a multicentred way, combining and contrasting the cultural inspiration of a plurality of regional traditions world-wide (sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, China, the North Atlantic region, etc.), so as to constrain and, to the extent of the possible, overcome North Atlantic hegemony in knowledge production. Adoption and resuscitation of the journal Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de Philosophie has been one of the strategies towards this goal. Making the chair's academic and literary production, and even his engagement in African therapy, globally and freely available on the Internet, has been another such strategy. The most recent development is the creation of an intercontinental network of PhD candidates. Considering the paucity of intercontinental scholarships for Intercultural Philosophy and related fields, those PhD candidates who live outside Europe will not be invited to take up residence in the Netherlands; instead, they will remain in their own country (where they typically hold an academic appointment) during most of the period of their PhD work, and their supervision will take the form of a combination of annual local visits by their supervisor, in combination with extensive e-mail contact and internal circulation and discussion of their papers on the network's private website. Only towards the end of the PhD trajectory a few months' stay in the Netherlands is foreseen, to finalise the thesis and to prepare for the defense. The network is an initiative of the chair of Intercultural Philosophy, with support from the African Studies Centre (Leiden), Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the Erasmus University Trust fund. Participation in the network is by cooptation only, subject to the chair's approval of an extensive (at least 25 pp., 10,000 words) project proposal, including full bibliography and time table. Cameroon (click for map)The presence, in Cameroon, of a small core of two PhD students belonging to the PhD Network on Intercultural Philosophy prompted Wim van Binsbergen to visit them as supervisor in March 2005. Long and fruitful supervisory sessions, both groupwise and individually, were combined with an intensive tour of formal public lectures in three Cameroonian universities. These lectures also created the context for informal and most cordial intellectual exchanges with dozens of Cameroonian senior colleagues in the fields of philosophy, social sciences, history, economics, political science, Egyptology, literary studies, and biology; and to meet with dozens of advanced students already preparing for local PhD theses, many of whom presented their projects in detail as a basis for intensive and mutually inspiring discussions. These contacts laid the foundation for intensive exchanges with senior colleagues in the near future, and possibly for a further expansion of the Cameroonian branch of the PhD Network on Intercultural Philosophy. By and large these two weeks of intensive touring brought out the high level of scholarship existing in Cameroon (many professors hold French doctorats d' Etat, comparable with the German Habilitation and in many respects superior to Anglosaxon PhDs -- and these qualities reflect on the students); the eagerness and capability to engage in incisive intellectual debate with international visitors; but also the great disparities in facilities and endowments that exist between the three universities visited:
The local organisation of this supervision and lecturing tour was efficiently executed by the PhD candidate Mr Pius Mosima (lecturer at the National Institute for Public Administration). Prof. Godfrey Tangwa, Head of the Department of Philosophy, graciously acted as official host on behalf of the University of Yaounde I. The PhD candidate Mr Pascal Touoyem, of the Department of Philosphy Yaounde I and the Service Oecuménique pour la Paix SEP (Yaounde), made additional logistic contributions, e.g. SEP enabled us to conduct our PhD seminars in a quiet and well-equipped environment. George Ekema was our patient, resourceful and reliable driver throughout the entire period. Cameroon happens to be one of the South countries where members of the PhD Network on Intercultural Philosophy are residing. Similar supervision and lecturing tours are now being prepared for South Africa and Indonesia, while the People's Republic of China is under consideration. formal addresses deliveredThe following seminars and public lectures were given by Wim van Binsbergen during his Cameroonian tour: at the Université Catholique de l'Afrique Centrale: 1. 'La notion de l' hégémonie come concept clé de la philosophie interculturelle', lecture for graduate students preparing for the licenciate, Université Catholique de l'Afrique Centrale, Monday 14 March 2005, 11-13.00 hrs; the French argument presented was based on a selection from Wim van Binsbergen's book Intercultural encounters, especially the introduction and the final chapter 2. 'L'Afrocentricité et la lutte pour une perspective africaine sur l'histoire universelle de la culture', public lecture, Université Catholique de l'Afrique Centrale, Wednesday 16 March 2005, 15.00-18.00 hrs; the French argument presented was a combination of those available at Wim van Binsbergen's webpage on Afrocentricity, both in French and in English at the University of Buea 3. 'Globalisation: African agency in the appropriation of global culture', public lecture, University of Buea, staff and senior students of the social science faculty, Tuesday 22 March 2005, 11.00-13.30 hrs; the English argument presented was gleaned from Wim van Binsbergen's co-edited book Situating globality: African agency in the appropriation of global culture, especially the introduction (with Rijk van Dijk and Jan-Bart Gewald) at the Université de Yaounde I 4. 'Qu'est-ce que c'est que la philosophie interculturelle?', public lecture, Université de Yaounde I, facultés de philosophie et des sciences sociales, Wednesday 23 March 2005, 14-17.00 hrs; the French argument presented was based on a selection from Wim van Binsbergen's book Intercultural encounters, especially the introduction, the final chapter, and chapters 5-8 5. 'Valentin Mudimbe: Dilemmas of universalism and homelessness -- is it possible to ground our knowledge production as Africans in our African identity and experience?', public lecture, Université de Yaounde I, facultés de philosophie et des sciences sociales, Thursday 24 March 2005, 13-15.00 hrs; the English argument presented was a condensation of Wim van Binsbergen's very extensive paper 'An incomprehensible miracle: Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbes Tales of Faith', in press in the Journal of African Cultural Studies (2004, to appear June 2005), pp. 10-65. |
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