July 25 - 26, 2017 | Freie Universitaet Berlin, Seminarzentrum, Room L115, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin

From an etymological perspective, the term “culture” derives from the Latin verb “colere”, meaning: to engage in agricultural activities; and, indeed, what we commonly refer to as culture appears to have emerged relatively recently in the history of humankind. For a period of approximately 150,000 years, our ancestors lived a non-sedentary life. It was only when they developed techniques of cultivating land that “culture” in a modern sense developed: houses, cities, polities, religions, the fine arts, script systems, the systematic exploration of the world, and also early stages of what we would come to call science. Agricultural developments facilitated sustaining an ever-growing population, while actually needing less land to do so; at the same time, it necessitated forms of “organizing” this increasingly concentrated population—that is, of replacing the informal and spontaneous patterns of interaction typical of non-sedentary life with various “rules”, “norms”, “structures”, and “hierarchies”.
There is an important juncture in this “Culturocene” (a term one might devise to replace the somewhat misconceived “Anthropocene”, a word that has become popular in recent times): the development of written language decidedly divides this age into a “before” and an “after”. At the same time, the following consideration will also have to guide the workshop’s framework: as such, scripturality is not a replacement for orality, but rather a sort of supplement; for textual culture “adds” new items to a previous material culture, while the latter continues as the indispensable basis of a largely material existence.
Accordingly, this workshop’s main topic of discussion was the question whether symbolic “cultural” arrangements of matter (that is, texts) follow rationales of evolution that differ (substantially) from the evolutionary rationale(s) of predominantly non-symbolic, literally “material” arrangements of matter. One might hypothesize that the possibility to textually encode the instructions as to how one might produce various items of material culture drastically accelerated the latter’s use value. Regarding the influence of one form of culture on the other, one might raise the question as to whether there is a factual difference between items of material culture and such of textual culture in terms of (their respective) evolution; or whether it is only the current (and mostly unreflected) conceptualizations of these diverse items that might differ.

During the Joint Workshop renowned humanities scholars from the networks partner universities presented new research topics — while enjoying the possibility of discussing these in detail, and of further developing them conjointly. Particularly this workshop was to serve all participating scholars as an incubator for novel (research) initiatives and other forms of collaboration.

Program:

Please find the program here.