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3rd symposium of the Special Research Centre 295 -
Cultural and linguistic contacts.
Processes of change in historical conflict areas
in Northeast Africa/Western Asia
"The Culture of Contact"
2004, October, 21 - 24
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (Germany)
The third symposium of our research centre will be on "culture of
contact" - a term with which we want to refer to social constructions
of reality and cultural objectivations as they emerge through
contact-induced processes of communication. Thus, our project will deal
with both well-defined forms of cultural contact and cultures that in
one way or another are the result of contact-induced change. The
cultivation of contact between societies only starts when transcultural
encounters become permanent and lead to the establishment of network
structures (see figure below). Specialists such as traders, messengers,
translators and ritual specialists as well as people living on the
borderline of different cultures play an important role in these
network structures because they initiate contact and they contribute to
its conventionalization. Two resulting stages might develop out of an
initial stage (a) of cultivated contact in the schema below: First, a
well-established culture of contact constitutes a separate cultural
sphere restricted to interactions between the original cultures
involved (b). Second, the cultures in contact merge to such an extent
that a new syncretistic culture evolves (c).
Figure: The development of a "culture of contact" [coming soon]
The symposium focuses on the description and interpretation of various
forms and modalities concerning the cultivation of contact in stage
(a). The emergence and maintenance of a culture of contact is
characterised by different prerequisites and motivations. Therefore, a
culture of contact may evolve out of dynamic, flexible, adaptive, or
extroverted cultures, as well as out of cultures that are static,
self-contained or introverted. According to the type of contact, the
relationship between the individuals (mostly professional specialists)
and groups who are involved in contact situations may be symmetrical or
asymmetrical, close or loose, strong or weak, long lasting or short
termed. In addition, this relationship may be expressed in different
contact media, i.e. objectivations.
Hence, the papers presented at the symposium will deal with the
description and analysis of (i) social processes (everyday
interactions, debates, conflicts, interaction rituals, etc.), (ii)
emerging constructions of reality (religious beliefs, ideologies,
self-images, images of the other, etc.), or (iii) cultural
objectivations (objects of everyday life, written and oral texts,
constructions and artefacts representing religious or political ideas,
rigidly fixed rituals, etc.). As a matter of fact, language interacts
with each of these three domains.
The
following questions are of special interest: What are the specific
situations and motivations for establishing a culture of contact? How
and at which point does a contact culture proceed from phase (a) to
phase (b) or (c), respectively? How does the culture of contact
manifest itself in language structures?
Due
to the lack of sufficient data in the respective fields of research it
is not always possible to observe processes in phase (a) directly.
Therefore, we are also interested in mechanisms that allow the
reconstruction processes in (a) drawing on data from the subsequent
phases (b) and (c).
Ultimately,
the objective of the symposium is to establish an interdisciplinary
approach to contact induced change in human culture. This approach
should make it possible to integrate different dimensions of cultural
contacts (processes, constructions of reality, objectivations) into a
wider context of causal correlations and, finally, into a coherent
theory of the role of contact in culture.
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Theme (eng.) 