SFB 1288

In the last months, several new articles and books have been published by the SFB 1288; some of them have emerged from events or have been written on related topics.

• Christina Brauner and Antje Flüchter (Eds.): "Recht und Diversität. Lokale Konstellationen und globale Perspektiven von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart" ('Law and Diversity. Local constellations and global perspectives from the early modern period to the present') (subproject B01)
  The topic "Law and Diversity" connects the different current discussions and shows how society deals with difference and equality—thus also as a practice of comparing. The contributors to this volume study this topic from a historical perspective and examine constellations and ways of dealing with legal diversity from the early modern period to the present.
• Christina Brauner: "Polemical Comparisons in Discourses of Religious Diversity: Conceptual Remarks and Reflexive Perspectives" (subproject B01)
  Using comparisons to belittle others is a technique we know from everyday life. In discourses of religious diversity, such polemical comparisons play an important role in inter- and intra-religious boundaries and hierarchies. In her article, Christina Brauner combines polemical comparisons with more general methodological questions.
• Johannes Grave, Joris Corin Heyder and Britta Hochkirchen (Eds.): "Sehen als Vergleichen. Praktiken des Vergleichens von Bildern, Kunstwerken und Artefakten" ('Viewing as Comparing. Practices of Comparing Images, Artworks and Artifacts') (subproject C01)
  What does comparative viewing do with pictures and observers? How is the gaze directed through comparing and how are pictures made comparable? Practices of comparing encourage physical, medial or metaphorical changes of view. The contributions in this volume take a broad historical and systematic perspective on the practices underlying the comparing of images and artifacts.
• Raimund Schulz: "Als Odysseus staunte – Die griechische Sicht des Fremden und das ethnographische Vergleichen von Homer bis Herodot" ('When Odysseus Wondered—The Greek View of the Foreign and Ethnographic Comparing from Homer to Herodotus') (subproject B04)
  No other culture of antiquity was as intensively occupied with the foreign as the Greeks, and developed a form of ethnographic argumentation that shaped the view of the foreign far beyond antiquity; this also included comparing different ethnic groups according to fixed criteria. The book explains these phenomena for the first time in their historical-political context.
• Antje Flüchter: "Die Vielfalt der Bilder und die eine Wahrheit. Die Staatlichkeit Indiens in der deutschsprachigen Wahrnehmung (1500–1700)" ('The Diversity of Images and the One Truth. The Statehood of India in German Perception (1500-1700)' (subproject B01)
  In the pre-modern era, India was a European place of longing as a 'treasure chest': Europeans were not only surprised, however, they usually also had to adapt to Indian habits and customs. In her habilitation thesis, Antje Flüchter traces the processes of description and rewriting of the German-speaking perception of India from the 16th century to the transition to modernity; she examines the production of knowledge from travelogues to compilations and encyclopedias.
• Afua Cooper and Wilfried Raussert (Photos): "Black Matters" (subproject B02)
  "Black Matters" is a dialogue between image and text: a jambalaya. Cooper translates Raussert's photos into poems that focus on the everyday experiences of Black people. This visual and textual dialogue pays tribute to the different "layers of Blackness" in the African Diaspora in North America and Europe. The book was included in the top 10 list of the Canadian platform "Loan Stars" from October 2020.
• Leopold Ringel and Tobias Werron: "Pandemic Practices, Part One. How to Turn 'Living Through the COVID-19 Pandemic' into a Heuristic Tool for Sociological Theorizing" (associated DFG project about the institutionalization of rankings)
  In their article, Ringel and Werron use the Covid 19 pandemic as an opportunity for an experiment in sociological theorizing. They propose the concept of "pandemic practices" with which they want to grasp the social practices that emerge, are reproduced, linked and separated again during the pandemic, up to the (de-)institutionalization of certain practices. They draft a first tentative typology of pandemic practices. These include the so-called "pandemic meta-practices", which discuss, compare or evaluate other pandemic practices and which, by relating to them, can help to ensure that certain pandemic practices prevail—or perhaps even remain after the end of the pandemic.