Global co-incidence: heterotopic performance at the Areopagos

Global co-incidence: heterotopic performance at the Areopagos Public Deposited

Last Modified

Creator

Terry, David P.
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication

Abstract

Through ethnographic engagement with the Areopagos (Mars Hill) next to the Acropolis in Athens Greece, I articulate some of what it means or might mean to belong in a global world. The rock is a site of religious pilgrimage, secular tourism, making out, buying and selling of drugs among other activities. It is an example of what Foucault has called a heterotopia in which multiple real places converge on the same space. The simultaneous heterogeneity of the rock offers a way through which to rethink globalization as producing and being produced by what I call co-incidences: events of coming together in space about which the question of causality must remain suspended. The notions of co-incidence and heterotopia help me to frame globalization not in terms of abstract mobility and dislocation but in terms of concrete performance practices. In so doing, I call for a more spatial theory of performance and a more performative theory of spatiality.

Date of publication