Researching Contemporary Cosmologies - In the Field

MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity St David, UK. The powerpoint slides are part of the MA online WebEx seminars. The Researching Contemporary Cosmology module is co-taught with Bernadette Brady and Maria Nita.

MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University of Wales Trinity St David, UK. The powerpoint slides are part of the MA online WebEx seminars. The Researching Contemporary Cosmology module is co-taught with Bernadette Brady and Maria Nita. http://www.uwtsd.ac.uk/sophia/

Journal of Skyscape Archaeology, 2020

Trends in Modern Cosmology, 2017

Scientific cosmology is the study of the universe through astronomy and physics. However, cosmology also has a significant cultural impact. People construct anthropological cosmologies (notions about the way the world works), drawing in scientific theories in order to construct models for activities in disciplines, such as politics and psychology. In addition, the arts (literature, film and painting, for example) comment on cosmological ideas and use them to develop plot lines and content. This chapter illustrates examples of such work, arguing that scientific cosmology should be understood as a significant cultural influence.

2014

Astroculture is a testament to the literary imagination and theoretical innovation of the late Sonja A.J. Neef, who devised the term as an expanding horizon of collaborative research—into the powerful gravitational force exerted on culture by astronomical phenomena and imagery. It is also the name of a conference on the topic inspired by Neef and held at the Center for Advanced Studies Morphomata at the University of Cologne in November, 2011. Indeed, Astroculture is a perfect instance of a morphome, the overall target of the Cologne College’s ongoing symposia: a persistent trope or topos of cultural fascination and transcription appearing across a gamut of civilizations and historical periods. Commentary in this volume ranges from Claudius Ptolemy’s mapping of the universe and the emergence of a pluralistic cosmology in seventeenth-century Europe to the spread of planetariums, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the contemporary artwork of Ingo Günter. With interventions by David Aubin, Lucía Ayala, Monika Bernold, Dietrich Boschung, Bruce Clarke, Gerd Graßhoff, Hans-Christian von Hermann, Martina Leeker, Patricia Pisters, and Henry Sussman.

2017

R commended Citatio Henty, Liz, Bernadette Brady, Darrelyn Gunzburg, Frank Prendergast, and Fabio Silva. 2017. "Editorial–Culture and Cosmos." In The Marriage of Astronomy and Culture: Theory and Method in the Study of Cultural Astronomy Papers from the 2016 SEAC Conference. Conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture edited by Nicholas Campion, 1–10. Bristol: Culture and Cosmos & Sophia Centre Press. doi:10.21427/D7V23S

Skyscape Archaeology, 2019

The 25th conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), entitled "Beyond Paradigms", was held in Bern from 4th to 7th September, 2019. When Felipe Criado-Boado, the EAA's president, made an official proposal for a joint meeting for EAA and the European Society of Astronomy in Culture (SEAC) last year, the SEAC executive committee considered it an exceptional occasion that the society could not miss. SEAC's committee also felt that 2019 was symbolically the right time for a joint EAA and SEAC conference, as it was both the 100th anniversary of the Dyson-Eddington-Davidson experiment that first tested general relativity and the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. However, this was not the first time that there was a cultural astronomy session at an EAA conference-the first instance was actually in Bournemouth in 1999, where an archaeoastronomy roundtable was organised. There was also a cultural astronomy session at the EAA conference in 2002 in Thessaloniki. At Bern, three sessions were devoted to cultural astronomy. The first of these was Session 233, organised by Lionel Sims and Roslyn Frank, entitled "Cultural Astronomy and Ontology: How Celestial Objects and Events Have Featured in the Belief Systems and Cosmologies of Different Societies". This session invited scholarly contributions that addressed how celestial objects and events have been integrated into belief systems across the world. Twelve presentations tried to answer questions such as whether ethno-graphic analogies help to develop methods and theories of cultural astronomy, whether our concepts are sufficiently sensitive to capture and respect the details of a local cosmology or whether there is any connection between the cosmologies of the world. Michael Rappenglück offered a general presentation of archaic cosmology models, highlighting the commonality of these models. Roslyn Frank clearly demonstrated how closely cultural anthropology, ethnohistory and archaeology are related to cultural astronomy

Presently cosmology is regarded as a discipline that is mainly concerned with the understanding of the cosmos in the heavens as an external readable structure that can reveal the origin of the Universe. In this context Man is positioned as an external observer detached from the studied phenomena. Such understanding of cosmology has a history that traces back to the origin of the word cosmos within the ancient Greek civilisation, as informed by a Man-world dichotomy and the symbolic placing of the unknown world in the sky. However, cosmology, as the word cosmos implies, is about the conceptualisation of the world, moreover, about the reflection and expression of the interrelation between world and Man and not about a detached cosmogenetic understanding of the universe through the heavens. Overcoming the restricting contemporary accounts of cosmology, the philosopher Rémi Brague presented an argument in the work The Wisdom of the World that rethinks cosmology within a framework where the human is fundamentally and inevitably implicated. Departing from Brague’s work, in this paper it will be argued that re-thinking cosmology requires a shift in focus to conceive of practices, such as drawing, as human worldly experiences bringing to the surface the role of the human as more than an observer of the world. This shift will be supported by a close examination of two hitherto separate discussions: cosmology as an emerging discipline during the Enlightenment and the role of drawing within the epistemological model of 18th century natural history.