Heidelberg 2009/2010

The Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" at the
University of Heidelberg presents:

The Power of Things and the Flow of Cultural Transformations
Lecture Series 2009 / 2010,

Thursday 6:15 pm to 8 pm

Karl Jaspers Centre, Voßstraße 2, Building 4400, 69115 Heidelberg,
Conference Room 212

Coordinator: Lieselotte E. Saurma

The lecture series aims at describing the role of things, artefacts,
luxurious objects, and ideas in cultural processes. Material artefacts such
as monuments, paintings, manuscripts, carpets, vessels etc. are signs of
cultural self-definition even if they are integrated from far away. Thus
culture is in a permanent process of becoming "colonized" by objects getting
so familiar, that they are embedded in the social and economic context as
"natural" indigenous things, specific signs of this culture. Normally, these
processes were not guided consciously, it is rather a question of cultural
achievements, started by networks such as courts, monasteries, legations and
organisations, transferred from single groups or even individuals in the
language of their own contexts, increasing the own cultural identity. Such
forms of transgression demand an inappreciable process of adaptation, guided
by upper classes top down, although in modern societies, a development
bottom up is possible, too. Therefore, this effort of integration assumes a
translation in inner cultural self-understanding, an adaptation of knowledge
and the framing of objects in their new traditional context.

Things and Culture

15.10.2009 NICHOLAS THOMAS (CAMBRIDGE): Maori Carving and Colonial History.
A supplement to Tene Waitere's Travels

29.10.2009 MARINA WARNER (LONDON): Riding the Carpet: Talismans and Toys in
the 1001 Nights

Nearer East

05.11.2009 MICHAEL STOLZ (BERNE): Oriental 'spolia'’ in Wolfram's Parzival’
and its manuscript tradition

26.11.2009 LISA MONNAS (LONDON): Flight of the phoenix. The impact of Mongol
silks in Europe (13th-14th centuries)

03.12.2009 LARRY SILVER (PENNSYLVANIA): India Ink. Imagery of the
Subcontinent in Sixteenth-Century Europe

10.12.2009 THOMAS LEISTEN (PRINCETON): Adaptation, interpretation and
misunderstanding: The after-life and disappearance of pictorial programmes
of Classical Antiquity during the early Islamic period

East Asia and the West

07.01.2010 TOSHIO WATANABE (LONDON): Modern Japanese Garden in a
Transnational context

14.01.2010 DAVID J. ROXBURGH (HARVARD): Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash's Report on
the Embassy to Khanbaligh. Artistic Exchange Between the Timurid and Ming
dynasties

21.01.2010 CHARLES BURNETT (LONDON): Musical Instruments as conveyors of
meaning from one culture to another

28.01.2010 TIMON SCREECH (LONDON): Export items of the English East India
Company in the early 17th century

For more details please contact:
Philipp Sack (sackasia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de)