1–2 July 2014
International Research Center

All along their history, ethnology and anthropology have been concerned not only with ritual and performative structures, processes and phenomena within individual cultures but also with the diverse relationships between them. Recent research approaches especially are less interested in the examination of ‘intercultural’ relationships emanating from static entities than in the complex and dynamic interweavings cutting across the divisions into nations, peoples, tribes, etc. (which often date back to colonial structures). Right from the start, work at the Research Center has particularly focused on these concepts of relational and transversal approaches to cultural processes of inter-and intraweaving. Ethnologists and anthropologists (such as Evelyn Schuler Zea, Klaus-Peter Köpping) have therefore repeatedly been involved in the Center’s work as Fellows.

The workshop »When Species Meet« – Approaches to Environmental Aesthetics, which brought together leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of ethnology, anthropology, philosophy, theater, and the Fellows of the Research Center, took up and deepened this approach by highlighting the interplay of such cultural processes with forms of theater and dance work. In what ways are stabilizing or de-stabilizing forces at work within processes of interweaving? What is the way in which categories such as ‘the human’ are created – how are these categories simultaneously undermined, and how do they reflect the supposed impossibility of an equal exchange with other forms of living? What is the role of narrative forms and myths in this? In what ways are these forms and myths updated and ‘translated’ for a given situation, and in what way are they embodied and mobilized?

Program