Entanglements
are the order of the day. In the last two decades or so, the notion of
entanglement has not only been very popular with historians (histoire croisée, Verflechtungsgeschichte),
but also on fields such as comparative literature, cultural
anthropology, archeology, and some social sciences. The concept of
entanglement enables researchers to avoid dealing with clearly
(pre-)defined social or political entities. It has awarded researchers
the opportunity to attain a freely chosen vantage point with regard to
both their evidence and concepts. Finally, it has proved especially
suitable for the analysis of social, intellectual and political agency
and interdependencies because of the concept’s capacity to break down
asymetries, dilute binaries and highlight questions of process (how?)
over quiddity (what?) and cause (why?).
The conference on ‘Harmful
Entanglements’ thus addresses a phenomenon caused not so much by a
principal methodological flaw in the concept of entanglement. Rather, it
aims to answer to the unacknowledged conditions of the concept’s
ubiquity, or, with other words, by its own ‘entanglement’ in a
particular political context. Arguably, the study of and the various
approaches to entanglements are products of an era of run-away
globalisation and the heuristic possibilities it has enabled/unleashed.
Scholars also began to ask questions that, to a degree, mirror the
concerns and expectations of this kind of neo-liberal instability and
acceleration. While many studies of entanglement were fed by general
optimism in their transformative power, significant research has also
been conducted on problems created by entanglement that encompasses
topics such as environmental history, international law and diplomacy,
(post-) colonialism, and the position of racist and fascist cultural
production in the history of modernity or the project of modernism.
By
and large, however, a silent assumption has been dominant: entanglement
has come to be considered a phenomenon that obeys a logic of accretion.
Entanglement by default seems not to lead to disentanglement but to a
new level of tighter entanglement.
The last few years with their
crises of contagion, war, and economic rifts and collapses may offer a
good occasion to question this assumption. It seems to be time to look
at those who in the past or today reject to be entangled and at those
etanglements that apparently proved detrimental. We aim to ask questions
such as: What kind of entanglements have been regarded as sufficiently
“bad” (harmful, exploitative, morally or legally unjustifiable,
politivcally flawed, economically costly and so on) to provoke attempts
at disentanglement? As dependencies (they may be understood as mutual as
ever) involve power inequalities, the question of agency in
disentanglements becomes crucial: What regimes of power trigger
decolonialisation and neo-colonialisation processes? Do harmful
entanglements lead to cultures of the vernacular, the backwater, the
obscure – or at least to a longing for them? Do ever-increasing
entanglements continuously diminish agency and lead to an animosity
against connectedness (as is observable in the present conjuncture of
failing optimism in globalization)? Which actors are prone to fear or
reject entanglements as principally dangerous or disastrous? When and
why do attempts at disentanglement fail?
This year's Max Weber
Foundation Conference is already the eighth such meeting organised by
the Max Weber Foundation for German Humanities Institutes Abroad. The
previous conferences of this format took place at the German Historical
Institutes in Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, Washington, Kairo, Rome, and Tokyo.
The Foundation Conference format takes up research topics from the
institutes of the Max Weber Foundation and discusses them in an
internationally comparative, trans- and interdisciplinary manner. The
Foundation Conferences involve all of the Foundation's institutes and
their partners.
The conference will take place in connection with
the opening of the new building of the Orient-Institut Istanbul in the
centre of Istanbul, in Galip Dede Caddesi 65, close to the Galata Tower.
Keynotes will be delivered by Prof. em. Dr. Monica Juneja (Heidelberg
University) and Prof. Dr. Eugene Rogan (Oxford University).
We
invite papers that engage with these or related problems in the past or
present and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Funding
(travel-expenses, board and lodging) are available for participants not
affiliated with the Max Weber Foundation. The language of the conference
is English. A volume of contributions will be published.
Please apply with an abstract of two pages and a cv to https://www.oiist.org/cfc/. Deadline for applications is Sunday February 25th.
Contact Information
Prof.Dr. Christoph K. Neumann
Orient-Institut Istanbul
Şahkulu Mah., Galip Dede Cad. No: 65
Beyoğlu - İstanbul TR-34421
Contact Email
neumann@oiist.org
