The main purpose of the post-graduate program „Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship“ is to combine empirical studies about different phenomena of cultural encounter with reflections about developments in the descriptive modes and analytical tools developed in the respective academic fields for the study of those contacts. This juxtaposition between practical scholarship and theoretical reflection is intended to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue about the historical and theoretical preconditions which our disciplines have developed over time for studying cases of cultural encounter. A further aim is to develop innovative methodical approaches for the description of cultural encounters in a cross-disciplinary fashion.
The background and decisive impulse for this project is the present transformation in the analysis and interpretation of cultural encounters which can be observed in different forms and in many different disciplines. The older theoretical paradigm, inspired by structuralist ideas but ultimately rooted in archaic forms of dualistic thinking, conceives of cultural difference in terms of binary oppositions and irreconcilable fundamental opposites. While this paradigm remains virulent in certain forms of popular scholarship and public discourse, international academic discourse has gradually replaced it with more complex and dialogical concepts for the analysis of ultural difference within the past two or three decades. The dissertation projects written within this program are expected to explore this important transformation with respect to specific case studies – from the iconographic representation of cultural difference and its scholarly reception in classical antiquity to the significance of hybrid forms in music and musicology; from an assessment of symbolic forms of cultural cohabitation and their textual codifications in the middle ages to the social, cultural and scientific consequences of global migrations since the early modern period.
In this fashion the program seeks to contribute to and extend the transdisciplinary contact zone between source-oriented research on the one hand and the analysis of scholarly discourses on the other.