ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Aftermath seeks to understand the legacy of the East Asian War of 1592-1598. This conflict involved over 500,000 combatants from Japan, China, and Korea; up to 100,000 Korean civilians were abducted to Japan. The war caused momentous demographic upheaval and widespread destruction, but also had long-lasting cultural impact as a result of the removal to Japan of Korean technology and skilled labourers. The conflict and its aftermath bear striking parallels to events in East Asia during World War 2, and memories of the 16th century war remain deeply resonant in the region. However, the war and its immediate aftermath are also significant because they occurred at the juncture of periods often characterized as “medieval” and “early modern” in the East Asian case. What were the implications for the social, economic, and cultural contours of early modern East Asia? What can this conflict tell us about war “aftermath” across historical periods and about such periodization itself? There is little Western scholarship on the war and few studies in any language cross linguistic, disciplinary, and national boundaries to achieve a regional perspective that reflects the interconnected history of East Asia. Aftermath will radically alter our understanding of the region’s history by providing the first analysis of the state of East Asia as a result of the war. The focus will be on the period up to the middle of the 17th century, but not precluding ongoing effects. The team, with expertise covering Japan, Korea, and China, will investigate three themes: the movement of people and demographic change, the impact on the natural environment, and technological diffusion. The project will be the first large scale investigation to use Japanese, Korean, and Chinese sources to understand the war’s aftermath. It will broaden understandings of the early modern world, and push the boundaries of war legacy studies by exploring the meanings of “aftermath” in the early modern East Asian context.

1 444 980 €

Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31

European incursions onto the narrow isthmian pass that divided and connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans made it a strategic node of the Spanish Empire and a crucial site for early modern globalization. On the front lines of the convergence of four continents, Old Panama offers an unusual opportunity for examining the diverse, often asymmetrical impacts of cultural and commercial contacts. The role of Italian, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French interests in the area, as well as an influx of African slaves and Asian merchandise, have left a unique material legacy that requires an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to its varied sources. Bones, teeth and artifacts on this artery of Empire offer the possibility of new insights into the cultural and biological impact of early globalization. They also invite an interdisciplinary approach to different groups’ tactics for survival, including possible dietary changes, and the pursuit of profit. Such strategies may have led the diverse peoples inhabiting this junction, from indigenous allies to African and Asian bandits to European corsairs, to develop and to favor local production and Pacific trade networks at the expense of commerce with the metropolis. This project applies historical, archaeological and archaeometric methodologies to evidence of encounters between peoples and goods from Europe, America, Africa and Asia that took place on the Isthmus of Panama during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Forging an interdisciplinary approach to early globalization, it challenges both Euro-centric and Hispano-phobic interpretations of the impact of the conquest of America, traditionally seen as a demographic catastrophe that reached its nadir in the so-called seventeenth-century crisis. Rather than applying quantitative methods to incomplete source material, researchers will adopt a contextualized, inter-disciplinary, qualitative approach to diverse agents involved in cultural and commercial exchange.

1 998 875 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

The project will examine the histories of yoga, ayurveda and rasashastra (Indian alchemy and iatrochemistry) from the tenth century to the present, focussing on the disciplines' health, rejuvenation and longevity practices. The goals of the project are to reveal the entanglements of these historical traditions, and to trace the trajectories of their evolution as components of today's global healthcare and personal development industries. Our hypothesis is that practices aimed at achieving health, rejuvenation and longevity constitute a key area of exchange between the three disciplines, preparing the grounds for a series of important pharmaceutical and technological innovations and also profoundly influencing the discourses of today's medicalized forms of globalized yoga as well as of contemporary institutionalized forms of ayurveda and rasashastra. Drawing upon the primary historical sources of each respective tradition as well as on fieldwork data, the research team will explore the shared terminology, praxis and theory of these three disciplines. We will examine why, when and how health, rejuvenation and longevity practices were employed; how each discipline’s discourse and practical applications relates to those of the others; and how past encounters and cross-fertilizations impact on contemporary health-related practices in yogic, ayurvedic and alchemists’ milieus. The five-year project will be based at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at Vienna University and carried out by an international team of 3 post-doctoral researchers. The research will be grounded in the fields of South Asian studies and social history. An international workshop and an international conference will be organized to present and discuss the research results, which will also be published in peer-reviewed journals, an edited volume, and in individual monographs. A project website will provide open access to all research results.

1 416 146 €

Start date: 2015-06-01, End date: 2020-05-31

Research on the role played by women as actors and by gender as a cultural category has crucially contributed to historiographical revision of the Enlightenment and its legacy to the modern world. However, the perspective adopted has been national or, if comparative, mostly radial. A leap forward is urgent because current circulationist approaches to the Enlightenment tend to forget its key gender dimension and to underplay contributions from Southern Europe. This projects offers, for the first time in the field, a systematic,truly transnational and transatlantic approach, which knits together cultural, intellectual, gender and postcolonial history, literary, philosophical and visual studies. It looks at the cultural transfer of gender notions in global perspective around five axes: translation, learned sociability, travel, reading and sensibility, to be explored through textual and iconographic analysis and archival research. Adopting the vantage point of Spain and its empire will allow to question approaches based either on the “national context” or the centre-periphery dichotomy, to reassess the role of the Catholic Enlightenment in the making of modernity and to highlight the mediating roles played by local actors, male and female, in processes of sociocultural change. CIRGEN’s specific objectives are: to challenge dichotomous visions of Enlightenment discourses of gender by stressing their plural (and often conflictive) contribution to modernity; to decenter customary radial perspectives by stressing multilateral dialogues both within Europe and beyond; to better understand the role played by gender in the cultural geography of Enlightenment, particularly in the construction of the South/North symbolic divide; to produce empirically grounded evidence of the practical and iconic role of women in the making of modern reading publics; to foster innovative scholarship on the gendering of emotions in defining national identities and moral standards of civilization.

2 499 415 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31