Das Wort „Tabu“, das bei Sigmund Freud Prominenz erhalten sollte und nicht mehr aus unserem Alltagswortschatz wegzudenken ist, brachte James Cook aus der Südsee mit. “Amok” bezeichnete die legendäre militärische Kampfeswut malayischer Elitekämpfer. Das Hakenkreuz – ein deutsches Fanal des Hasses – geht auf ein indisches Symbol des Glücks zurück, die Sintflut der hebräischen Bibel auf eine assyrische Erzählung und der Name des Online-Händlers „Amazon” auf den eines südamerikanischen Flusses – und dieser wiederum auf die Legenden von einem zentralasiatischen Frauenvolk. Das @-Zeichen der Cybemoderne bezeichnete eine iberische Masseinheit im 16. Jahrhundert. Der spitze Hut als Accessoire von Zauberern in bei Harry Potter begann als Kennzeichen für Fremde im griechischen Altertum und wurde dann zu einem Stigma von Juden im Mittelalter. Fast alles, was uns vertraut ist, stellt sich, wenn wir es genauer betrachten, als Ergebnis (bisweilen überraschender) Transfers heraus. Wenn Zeichen, Konzepte, Praktiken und Gegenstände wandern und sich verändern, stellen sie die essentialistische Vorstellung in Frage, Kulturen seien in sich gleichförmige und nach außen abgeschlossene Größen, die jeweils selbständig funktionieren und eindeutig bestimmt werden können. Der Schweizer Nationalheld, Wilhelm Tell, ist ein skandinavischer Mythos, den ein deutscher Schriftsteller dramatisierte. Das Bild der Germanen wiederum entwarf ein römischer Historiker. Was wir „Kultur“ nennen, ist immer auch das Ergebnis von „Transfer“.
Read MoreUntil the beginning of the 1990s, the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bern, Switzerland lived a kind of cellular life, fragmented into the smallest possible units, a diaspora existence in scattered houses. With the construction of the “Unitobler” in 1993, the humanities were given a center that would make it possible for the disciplinary institutes to live side by side, with one another and together. The humanities new “home” was the former Chocolat Tobler factory. Created by Theodor Tobler in Bern in 1908, Chocolat Tobler was the place of origin of the Toblerone, one of Switzerland’s icons with its distinctive triangular shape. Since 1993, the old Toblerone factory is now part of the city’s university. The so called “Unitobler” at the Länggasse is the home of the Faculty of Humanities. The heart of the Unitobler in every respect is its library, built into the newly created inner courtyard of the Tobler Factory.
Via the entrées, built of glass blocks, visitors enter a vast and unique space, not only because of the huge book towers and the ambivalence of inside and outside. But mainly, because the library consists of a labyrinthian assemblage of rhombic platforms on six different floors, all connected via bridges and spiral staircases, and (mostly) accessible from the surrounding institutes in the old building. Thus, at least in spatial terms, most of the disciplinary libraries are merged into one single large library. The basic idea is to assign the individual platforms directly to the institutes housed in the old building. The bridges connect the institutes with the library und thus all the institutes with each other. Given the labyrinthine arrangement, one is reminded strongly of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story of the Library of Babel—in fact it appears unlikely that the architect himself did not have Borges in mind.
Borges’ seminal 1941 story imagined an almost infinite library containing every possible combination of letters in a vast collection of 410-page books. That’s how Borges’ narrator describes it:
“The universe (which others call the Library), is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries […].”
“Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book; those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say.”
”In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is “total” – perfect, complete, and whole – and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) – that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.”
If you had told me that it would take a novel pathogen, to work like a charm, drilling hard into our collective heart, making us shiver with fear and empathy, I would have called you names. If you had told me it would take a novel pathogen, to snap our eyelids wide open to how the third world was and is made; people living in distress for generations, I would have thought you delusional.
I mean, if you had said it would take a novel pathogen, to slap us awake to the fading memory that we, as a species, are a link in the chain of life on earth; not its overlord, entitled to unbridled consumption of oceans, lakes, rivers, forests, animals, fruits, vegetables, and the earth itself, I would have smirked and walked away.
But here I am with veritable cognitive dissonance at the hoarding of basics, while shame eats me alive at the old neglectful care for children and people in places called underdeveloped. Or those children separated from their parents at the border, or somewhere. Or women clutching their bodies and their babies to fend off sexual and other violence. Or that drowned father and child. The thousands of humans floating on mercy in the Mediterranean Sea in search of hope; to say nothing of millions in refugee camps everywhere. If you had told me my stomach would cramp with anger, fear, and empathy, all at the same time, I would have died.
Read MorePhilipp Burkard (Leiter Science et Cité, Gastautor) [1]
Wir können nicht davon ausgehen, dass sich ein breites Publikum für unser absolutes Spezialgebiet interessiert. Einfach nicht!
An dieser Stelle könnte man als Kulturwissenschaftlerin, Linguist oder Historiker auch den Bettel hinschmeissen. Doch diesen Kurzschluss möchte ich nicht zulassen. Forschende der Geisteswissenschaften sind gefordert, aus ihren Themen punktuell Gegenstände herauszupicken und einem breiten Publikum näherzubringen. Indem wir ein Thema öffnen und in einen grösseren Zusammenhang bringen, können wir Beiträge zu einem demokratischen Diskurs leisten sowie kritisches Denken anregen. Idealerweise schaffen wir damit eine Hilfestellung und unser Publikum zieht aus den Informationen, die wir ihm in zugänglicher Form aufbereiten, einen praktischen Nutzen. Soweit die Theorie. Doch wie schaffen wir uns in einem Diskurs, in dem geisteswissenschaftliche Studiengänge oftmals als ‘Wohlfühl-Fächer’ abgetan werden, Gehör? Ein Blick in die Praxis beweist: Die Ausgangslage ist eigentlich gar nicht so schlecht, im Gegenteil.
Wieder einmal bin ich in Bamako, der Hauptstadt Malis. Genau vor vierzig Jahren wurde ich in dieser Stadt geboren. Mit einem Stipendium der Swiss African Research Cooperation (SARECO) kehre ich als Forscher wieder heim. In Mali möchte ich erfahren, wie Regierung (eng. Governance), Mehrsprachigkeit und nachhaltige Entwicklung in diesem Land praktiziert werden, wozu ich mit dem Institut des Sciences Humaines (ISH) zusammenarbeite. Seit 2016 bildet die Agenda 2030 den globalen geltenden Rahmen für die nationalen und internationalen Massnahmen zu einer gemeinsamen Lösung der zentralen Herausforderungen der Welt. Die englische Bezeichnung «Sustainable Development Goals» (SDGs) ist geläufiger. In ein paar Tagen fahre ich mit einem Forschungsteam nach Dioro. Doch nichts wurde vorbereitet wie abgemacht. Ich muss mich auch noch in Bamako zurechtfinden, denn die Stadt hat sich in den letzten Jahren stark verändert. Am meisten beschäftigt mich jedoch seit meiner Ankunft die Durchführbarkeit meines Forschungsprojekts: Wie soll ich in einem Land über die Agenda 2030 forschen, das mitten in einer gravierenden Sicherheits- und politischen Krise steckt? Wie kann ich Interviews über Themen wie Mehrsprachigkeit, nachhaltige Entwicklung und Partizipation in einem Land durchführen, wo gerade die Rede von ethnischen Konflikten ist? Wie kann ich in diesem Kontext der Umsetzung bzw. der Praxis meiner hochgepriesenen Ziele der Agenda 2030 im Alltag der Menschen nachspüren? Wie finde ich die Balance zwischen meiner Aufgabe als Wissenschaftler und meiner emotionalen und subjektiven Wahrnehmung des Landes in dieser desolaten Situation? Das wird alles andere als einfach.
Bamako. Für einen Rückkehrer ist Bamako nicht mehr erkennbar. Die Stadt wird unaufhaltbar gross, eigentlich zu gross. Bamako wird auch «die Stadt der drei Kaimane» genannt – auf Bambara bedeutet die Bezeichnung allerdings „der Fluss der Kaimane“. Im 16. Jahr wurde die Stadt von Angehörigen vom Stamm der Marka gegründet. Es wird dort am meisten Bambara gesprochen, die vorherrschende Nationalsprache, die viele Malier als Erst-, Zweit-, oder zumindest Drittsprache beherrschen. Während der französischen Kolonialzeit wurde Bamako zur Hauptstadt des französischen Sudan. Nach der Unabhängigkeit ist sie die Hauptstadt von Mali. So hat sie sich zum wichtigsten wirtschaftlichen, politischen und soziokulturellen Zentrum des Landes etabliert. Experten zufolge repräsentiert Bamako heutzutage eine der wachstumsreichsten Städte Afrikas. Von den 18 Millionen Einwohnern des Landes ist jeder Zehnte hier wohnhaft. Die Stadt boomt: überall Baustellen und Kräne. Seit Beginn der Krise in 2012 strömen Flüchtlingswellen in die Hauptstadt und tauchen dort in Menschenscharen bei Verwandten ab – oder auch nicht. Zudem sind Bettler und Strassenkinder an jeder Verkehrsampel zu sehen.
Read MoreIch bin Sozialanthropologin und betreibe Ethnografie und ethnografische Theorienbildung. Hierbei sind für mich – selbstverständlich – immer auch Arbeiten aus der Philosophie, Soziologie, Geschichte oder der Politikwissenschaft bedeutsam. Für meine Forschung spielen diese Quellen der Inspiration aber gleichsam eine untergeordnete Rolle. Ich eigne mir ein theoretisches Konzept aus der Philosophie in einer sozialanthropologischen Weise an, um etwa meinen analytischen Blick auf mein ethnografisches Material zu schärfen. Forschende aus anderen Fächern werden mit sozialanthropologischen Arbeiten in ähnlicher Weise umgehen. Diese grenzüberschreitenden Aneignungen verbinden uns mit verschiedenen Fächern der Geisteswissenschaften. Und doch bedeuten sie noch keine echte Zusammenarbeit.
Mit dem Workshop “Stadt und Schatten: Interdisziplinäre Erkundungen in Architektur, Kunst und Gesellschaft”, den ich kürzlich gemeinsam mit der Literaturwissenschaftlerin und Philosophin, Tea Lobo, und der Kunsthistorikerin, Jennifer Rabe, am Walter Benjamin Kolleg der Universität Bern organisiert habe, stellten sich mir neue Fragen der Interdisziplinarität und ihrer Bedeutung für meine eigene Forschung und die Geisteswissenschaften insgesamt. Wie kann eine interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit stattfinden, die über das einseitige Anleihen bei anderen uns mehr oder weniger verwandten Fächern hinausgeht? Und was soll (uns) dieser vertiefte Austausch bringen?
Ich bin zunehmend von der politischen Notwendigkeit einer geisteswissenschaftlichen Zusammenarbeit überzeugt und davon, dass wir eine gemeinsame Politik der (Wissens-)Vielfalt brauchen, um unsere unterschiedlichen, im kritischen Denken gründenden Erkenntnisse und Forschungsweisen auch der breiteren Gesellschaft zugänglich zu machen. Versuche konkreter interdisziplinärer Zusammenarbeit können hierbei einen wichtigen Anfang bilden – sofern sie einen fruchtbaren Boden für grenzüberschreitendes Denken und Forschen bereitstellen.
Bei unserem Versuch diente uns die Schattenmetapher – in Anlehnung an Mieke Bals (2009) prozesshaftes Verständnis von Interdisziplinarität – als gemeinsame und gemeinsam weiter auszuarbeitende Kategorie des wissenschaftlichen Denkens über Widersprüchliches und Widerständisches in der Stadt und städtischen Kunst, Politik und Gesellschaft.
Read MoreSufism, the mystical, spiritual tradition of Islam has contributed to the development of an intellectual, artistic and musical heritage in Muslim societies around the world. Progressive Muslim cultural activists, artists and performers get inspired by Sufism as an antidote to a puritanical Islamist worldview. Sufism, therefore, cultivate an alternative voice within Muslim public sphere.
The individuals and groups formally and informally associated with Sufism organise diverse events such as music, dance and literature festivals, seminars, conferences and TV talk shows and thus give impetus to the formation of a pluralist cultural sphere with a vital counter-culture.
The countercultural force of Sufi heritage culture is increasingly acknowledged and praised by both academia and public media. Moreover, Sufi heritage culture is increasingly seen as a site of knowledge production calling for attention to recognize its transformative potential also within humanities research.
Sundar Sarukkai’, in a 2017 essay on the location of the humanities in India, describes a deep distrust of the humanities role as a valuable knowledge system. Meaningful knowledge in society is supposed to be produced in science (meaning the STEM-disciplines) alone. Sarukkai thus calls for a revitalization of the humanities epistemological role. Part of his project to “epistemologize the humanities” includes rethinking the epistemological role of indigenous literatures, languages, religion, philosophy, and artistic expression. Sarukkai calls for treating them as “knowledge systems” in order to acknowledge their meaningful role in society, and therefore their immediate applicability. This would shift the focus from the useless question of usefulness towards the humanities’ applicability.
Given this context, the conceptualisation of Sufism as knowledge system might counter both asymmetrical ideas that knowledge is produced in natural sciences or in traditional academic institutions (including the humanities) alone. The conception of heterodox Sufism as an intellectual tradition and knowledge system contributes to the formulation of inclusive and pluralist identity narratives with powerful urgency against intolerance, polarisation and politics of hate. This inclusion might thus be a fruitful starting point to counter not only exclusivist Islamist narratives but also the exclusionary nature of a dominant Eurocentric politics of knowledge.
My engaged anthropology and ethnomusicology research work with pluralist Sufi heritage performance in Sindh province in Pakistan takes me to interact with, learn and get inspired from diverse people and competing practices.
On the mornings of February 17, 2019, I travelled to Sehwan Sharif, a small old town in Sindh (Pakistan) famous for its heterodox Sufi shrine of the 13th century Qalandari vagabond Sufi Usman Marwandi. Popularly known among devotees as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, he made this pre-Islamic Hindu site of Shivasthan (now Sehwan) his final abode after travelling from the central Asian city of Marwand (now Azerbaijan). Devotees from all over Pakistan travel to Sehwan, pay devotional homage to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and perform Sufi rituals. Dhamaal, the ecstatic, rapturous dance by men, women and transgender people is the distinct spatial-performative feature of the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in South Asian heterodox Sufi tradition – as is smoking hashish.
Read MoreSheldon: Wait! You bought me a present?
Penny: Uh-huh.
Sheldon: Why would you do such a thing?
Penny: I don’t know. ‘Cause it’s Christmas?
Sheldon: Oh, Penny. I know you think you’re being generous, but the foundation of gift-giving is reciprocity. You haven’t given me a gift, you’ve given me an obligation.
The conversation above, from an episode of The Big Bang Theory, reveals Sheldon Cooper’s displeasure over a Christmas present Penny got him. His distress does not stem from the gift itself but the obligation of reciprocity that is associated with gift-giving.
Penny: Now, honey, it’s okay. You don’t have to get me anything in return.
Sheldon: Of course I do. The essence of the custom is that I now have to go out and purchase for you a gift of commensurate value and representing the same perceived level of friendship as that represented by the gift you’ve given me. It’s no wonder suicide rates skyrocket this time of year.
Sheldon illustrates one of Anthropology`s oldest conundrums; Gift-giving as an object of study as well as a quagmire researcher`s grapple with in the field. In what is considered the foundational social theories of exchange, Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (1925), begins his inquiry via two questions: first, what are the standards by which a gift received must be repaid? Second, what intensity of meanings is contained in the gift given that obliges the recipient to reciprocate? From his findings in North West America, Melanesia and Polynesia, Mauss states that every gift given is constituent of a structure of reciprocity in which the respect of giver and recipient are involved. The exchange of gifts in this sense, is not reduced to generating economic profit but in establishing and maintaining social relationships, according to Mauss, “a total social phenomenon”. There have been quite a number of diverse theories on gift-giving after Marcel Mauss, of course, but we wouldn’t want to open a can of worms here.
Let`s face it, we are in one way or the other entangled in the quagmire of reciprocity, from friendships, workplace and social etiquettes and even gestures as mundane as smiling back at someone on a bus.
But it does get even more intricate with researchers in the field! My colleagues and fellow anthropologists converged with our musings at the workshop, “Ethnography as Exchange: Power, Money, Debt” organized by Prof. Heinzpeter Znoj, Director of the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern at Schlöss Ueberstorf from September 20-22, 2018. The workshop set out to explore the myriad ways Anthropologists engage with their research partners. It provided a platform for Ph.D. researchers to share and analyse various intricate situations where an equilibrium in reciprocity with research partners is attempted. Can both parties hold an equal number of aces?
Read MoreRuramisai Charumbira & Michael Toggweiler
Welcome to THoR, also known as Taking the Humanities on the Road!
THoR is an Ideas-and-Action Lab at the interdisciplinary Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg). The WBKolleg is part of the Faculty of the Humanities at the University of Bern. The lab leaders launched THoR in 2018 as a politically and intellectually independent bottom-up working group to increase the visibility of research in the humanities and the social sciences and to demonstrate their continued critical importance of innovation and engagement.
Politicians and certain media circles increasingly question the practical and economic usefulness of the humanities. Technological and other innovations coupled with life changing knowledge production at the dawn of the 21st century, in such discourse, are mostly linked with the Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (plus Medicine), the STEM disciplines in everyday parlance. At least, on a superficial glance, these natural, physical and health sciences and engineering indeed seem to have harnessed information technologies to make their disciplines applicable to most people’s private and public everyday lives while the humanities have seem to lag behind. This, of course, is not to suggest that all STEM disciplines have found better, or the best, ways of communicating the meaningfulness of their research and have, therefore, entirely eclipsed the humanities as spaces for innovation and making and finding meaning. The humanities are still present in the media, although scattered among many ressorts. It is also not to suggest that the humanities have lost their credit in the opinion of the general public; Philipp Burkard from Science et Cité believes the humanities are still held in favorable view, as the Science Barometer Switzerland, a yearly survey asking what the Swiss think about scientific issues, does not show otherwise.
Rather, THoR notes the irony that the humanities are about how humans drive innovation in pursuit of meaning – in the past and present – yet, the humanities disciplines seem to have found themselves both flatfooted and misunderstood in their responses to some of the loudest cries of the humanities’ irrelevance in society. Markus Zürcher, Director of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW), articulated this humanities conundrum for a Swiss academic framework succinctly when he wrote that:
“At least since the turn of the millennium, science and knowledge are recognized as key production factors that contribute significantly to value creation, productivity, economic growth and welfare. However, with regard to the humanities in particular, this … added value escapes the superficial view.”
— Zürcher, Markus, Gegenstand, Relevanz und Praxis der Geisteswissenschaften, in: SAGW (2016), Swiss Academies Communications 11(5)
Martha Nussbaum, in 2010, took this a step further, articulating an American as well as a global perspective on the importance of the humanities. She wrote:
“The humanities and the arts are being cut away in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen by policy-makers as useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, they are rapidly losing their place in curricula, and also in the minds and hearts of parents and children.”
— Nussbaum, Martha, Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2010
These country specific, and general developments in academia emerge within a global academic governance that ties utilitarianism to education and training according to “strategic” institutional aims. This, in turn, raises pressure for humanities scholars to increase their visibility and public outreach in order to attract students and third-party funding, and/or to evaluate their research achievements along quantifiable criteria. All this, it could be argued, is done in order for universities and colleges to be internationally competitive in a market-like situation that conceptualizes knowledge and meaning as commodities with quantifiable value.
Of course, here in Switzerland, there have been responses by Swiss humanities scholars and institutions. For example, some five years ago, the SAGW launched discussions and publications to boost the humanities in Switzerland. There have also been articles in mostly Zurich-based newspapers defending the usefulness and relevance of the humanities in the 21st Century against attacks of right wing media, as well as initiatives such as the Blog Geschichte der Gegenwart, initiated by Philipp Sarasin and others with its decidedly critical stance.
ThoR’s own take is that there are many ripe opportunities for the humanities to respond to explicit or implicit demands and critique coming from internal and external stakeholders. Indeed, THoR argues that though the humanities have sometimes seemed to be at a loss for words when asked to justify the continued existence of anthropologists, historians, philosophers etc., it is imperative that we (humanities and social sciences scholars) tap into our varied traditions of bringing forth the basic questions that all disciplines, old and new, grapple with today. THoR is inspired by, among others, scholars like Mikhail Epstein who call for focused and intentional responses to these demands for pushing back the humanities by turning into “avenues of conceptual creativity” in academic institutions in general. As he puts it:
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