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Wintersemester 2012/13

SCM Study Group Winter Term 2012/13: “Bewilderment and Multiple Modernities”

With this topic we intend to introduce those theories dealing with fundamental social and cultural changes within processes of societal modernization. Special attention will be paid to the reactions of bewilderment (i.e. acceptance and refusal of the other, the foreign) that the processes of modernization provoke.

We understand these theories to be varying self-descriptions of societies, which wish to reflect on the process of differentiation of autonomous functional areas. The primary aim here is to provide a multi-disciplinary introduction to the global scientific-theoretical and, at the same time, empirical discourse, which has exerted great influence upon the positions critical of the social developments during the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

One particular focus within the overall topic of multiple modernities will be on the way heritage and memory contributed to the contested character of modern culture and the complex ways in which these terms are related. Thus, the aim will be a close examination of the ways in which particular sites, objects, rites in the realm of culture are used to commemorate historical events and to draw on them for present day purposes. This will include questions on the formation of cultural landscapes, the confrontation with conflict-laden and violent pasts of local and national history, as well as the influence of philosophical and aesthetic developments. From here, we will go on to explore the intermingling of science, politics and environmental policy as seen, for example, in the growing role of non-state actors in governing economies and environments. Within a broader framework this will allow us to examine how cultural, scientific and economic world views have shaped issues and controversies concerning natural and cultural heritage, and how these are translated into policy approaches and instruments.

While there will be a constant intermingling of themes, each semester will have a respective emphasis. In the Winter Term we will begin with multiple modernities and then spend more time in the Summer Term examining memory and heritage.

Convenors: Daniele Cantini, Ralph Buchenhorst, and James Thompson

• Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.): Multiple Modernities, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers 2002, Introduction.
• Bruno Latour: We have never been modern, Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press 1993
• Walter Mignolo: „Coloniality: The Darker Side of Western Modernity“, in: ders., The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Durham/London: Duke University Press 2011, 1-21 (Reader zum Kopieren)
• Armando Salvatore, “Tradition and Modernity within Islamic Civilisation and the West”, in Muhammad Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore, and Martin van Bruinessen (Eds.). Islam and Modernity Key Issues and Debates. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2009
• Bjorn Thomassen, Anthropology and its many modernities: when concepts matter, Journal of the Royal Anthropologica Institute, 18, 160-178, 2012
• Rudy Visker, The Strange(r) within me, in: Ethical Perspectives: Journal fo the European Ethics Network 12, no. 4 (2005), 425-441, available also in the Internet: http://www.ethical-perspectives.be/viewpic.php?LAN=E&TABLE=EP&ID=938   

Additional suggested readings:

• Talal Asad, Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP 2003
• Arjun Appadurai: Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press 2005.
• Zygmund Bauman: Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press 2000.
• Dipesh Chakrabarty: Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002.

Tuesdays 12-2 p.m., first meeting: April 17, 2012

The aim of this reading group is to treat texts by Latin-American thinkers dealing with the particular situation of societies in the Ibero-American linguistic and cultural realm. The main issues are the colonial past, questions of the specific cultural identity and alternative representations of social and epistemic orders in South-America. While many of the texts are in Spanish we will also consider English and German translations.

The reading group is open to anyone interested.

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