Written Artefacts Across World Regions: Incommensurabilities and Comparisons

In the Winter Semester 2023/24, the Cluster of Excellence "Understanding Written Artefacts" / Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures convened the lecture series "Understanding Written Artefacts: Untold Stories / Schriftartefakte verstehen: Unerzählte Geschichten" to explore aspects of written artefacts that have not yet been brought to the foreground of scholarly conversations in written artefact studies.

 

The series also reflected on some of the cultural and disciplinary norms and ethical challenges that have shaped written artefact research so far. This year’s lecture series aims to expand these conversations on the (changing) norms, emphases, and trajectories of development that characterise contemporary written artefact research by presenting materials and perspectives from across world regions, and specifically from beyond Euro-American scholarly centres. In making room for further "untold stories", we want to focus particularly on the connections – the similarities, the entanglements, but also the incommensurabilities – that emerge when we look at research on artefacts originating from or located in different regions or at research informed by different scholarly and conservation traditions as well as by different cultural and political contexts. We hope that contributions to the series will enable us to discuss the powers and pitfalls of cross-cultural comparison as a productive yet also potentially limiting approach in written artefact research. Comparisons can sharpen our sensibility for the cross-cultural diversity of written artefacts and writing practices, but also stifle our capacity to convey radically diverse modes of knowledge and practice to our audiences. What aspects of written artefacts and of writing practices invite or, instead, defy comparisons? What insights can comparisons yield, what understandings might they obscure? And what thematic, methodological, and epistemological expansions can a focus on cross-cultural or cross-regional incommensurabilities help us envision? Lectures in the series will explore these questions by looking at case studies from Algeria, India, Iran, Mali, Mexico, Thailand, and Yemen.

 

The series comprises lectures in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Consecutive interpretation into English will be provided for the lectures in Arabic, French, and Spanish.

The series will be presented in hybrid format.