Carlingford, Ireland, June 19th - 21st, 2014
Myth maintains a powerful hold as an object of celebration and denigration. This remains true in thinking about the market, commerce, products and marketing. The celebrants of myth see it as a place of sanctuary for those oppressed by the barrenness of scientific positivism; it is a way of enflaming consumer desire; it helps frame moral judgements; it inspires romantic journeys of discovery; it helps in explorations of liminality; it enables us to reflect on the secularisation of religion and the sacralisation of the secular.
Yet myth is also denigrated by the children of the Enlightenment, that great project that sought to dispel any sense of the metaphysical, including fanciful stories of superstition, religion and myth. From a strictly positivist position, myth (and its cousins – dreams and fantasies) is at best flotsam and froth, or, at worst, dangerous and delusional. Within this tradition, myth’s proper place is as an object of research, and indeed it has long been studied by psychoanalysts, anthropologists and cultural theorists. While Freud thought of myth in a positive light, Marx (1843/1970) sought to expose it as a dangerous illusion, while for Barthes (1957) it was inscribed into consumers’ everyday use of objects, nurturing invidious ideologies. This take on myths continues in recent critiques that seek to ‘expose the myth’ of the marketing concept, advertising, ‘sustainable’ marketing, GNP growth etc. Myth, in this sense, is used as a pejorative label in what are best understood as political moves that seek to supplant one myth with (what will in time be seen as) another. Others argue that the greatest lie of all is for modernism to deny its own myth.
The aim of this conference in Carlingford, Ireland, land of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, the great prose epic of Irish storytelling, is to re-engage with the mythic by bringing marketing and cognate discipline scholars together with those who study myth and folklore. We seek explorations of myth-making and the market from different disciplines – for example - psychoanalysis, history, critical theory, textual analysis, visual culture and semiotics.
We will stay at Ghan House, a beautiful Georgian guesthouse in Carlingford village, surrounded by the foothills of the Slieve Foy Mountain, site of one of the Táin’s classic supernatural battles of Irish mythology.
Myth maintains a powerful hold as an object of celebration and denigration. This remains true in thinking about the market, commerce, products and marketing. The celebrants of myth see it as a place of sanctuary for those oppressed by the barrenness of scientific positivism; it is a way of enflaming consumer desire; it helps frame moral judgements; it inspires romantic journeys of discovery; it helps in explorations of liminality; it enables us to reflect on the secularisation of religion and the sacralisation of the secular.
Yet myth is also denigrated by the children of the Enlightenment, that great project that sought to dispel any sense of the metaphysical, including fanciful stories of superstition, religion and myth. From a strictly positivist position, myth (and its cousins – dreams and fantasies) is at best flotsam and froth, or, at worst, dangerous and delusional. Within this tradition, myth’s proper place is as an object of research, and indeed it has long been studied by psychoanalysts, anthropologists and cultural theorists. While Freud thought of myth in a positive light, Marx (1843/1970) sought to expose it as a dangerous illusion, while for Barthes (1957) it was inscribed into consumers’ everyday use of objects, nurturing invidious ideologies. This take on myths continues in recent critiques that seek to ‘expose the myth’ of the marketing concept, advertising, ‘sustainable’ marketing, GNP growth etc. Myth, in this sense, is used as a pejorative label in what are best understood as political moves that seek to supplant one myth with (what will in time be seen as) another. Others argue that the greatest lie of all is for modernism to deny its own myth.
The aim of this conference in Carlingford, Ireland, land of the Táin Bó Cuailnge, the great prose epic of Irish storytelling, is to re-engage with the mythic by bringing marketing and cognate discipline scholars together with those who study myth and folklore. We seek explorations of myth-making and the market from different disciplines – for example - psychoanalysis, history, critical theory, textual analysis, visual culture and semiotics.
We will stay at Ghan House, a beautiful Georgian guesthouse in Carlingford village, surrounded by the foothills of the Slieve Foy Mountain, site of one of the Táin’s classic supernatural battles of Irish mythology.