Travelling Concepts

Bringing together innovative and internationally renowned experts, this volume provides concise presentations of the main concepts and cutting-edge research fields in the study of culture (rather than the infinite multitude of possible themes). More specifically, the volume outlines different models for the study of culture, explores avenues for interdisciplinary exchange, assesses key concepts and traces their travels across various disciplinary, historical and national contexts. To trace the travelling of concepts means to map both their transfer from one discipline, approach or culture of research to another, and also to identify the transformations which emerge through these processes of transfer. The volume serves to show that working with (travelling) concepts provides a unique strategy for research and research design which can open up a wide range of promising perspectives for interdisciplinary exchange. It offers an exemplary overview of an interdisciplinary and international approach to the travelling concepts that organize, structure and shape the study of culture. In doing so, the volume serves to initiate a dialogue that exceeds disciplinary and national boundaries and introduces a self-reflexive dimension to the field, thus affording a recognition of how deeply disciplinary premises and nation-specific research traditions affect different approaches in the study of culture.

Attempting to bridge the gap between specialised scholarship in the humanistic disciplines and an interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis, Mieke Bal has written an intellectual travel guide that charts the course 'beyond' cultural studies. As with any guide, it can be used in a number of ways and the reader can follow or willfully ignore any of the paths it maps or signposts. Bal's focus for this book is the idea that interdisciplinarity in the humanities - necessary, exciting, serious - must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than its methods. Concepts are not grids to put over an object. The counterpart of any given concept is the cultural text or work or 'thing' that constitutes the object of analysis. No concept is meaningful for cultural analysis unless it helps us to understand the object better on its own terms. Bal offers the reader a sustained theoretical reflection on how to 'do' cultural analysis through a tentative practice of doing just that. This offers a concrete practice to theoretical constructs, and allows the proposed method more accessibility. Please note: illustrations have been removed from the ebook at the request of the rightsholder.

Narrative is a pioneer concept in our trans-disciplinary age. For decades, it has been one of the most successful catchwords in literature, history, cultural studies, philosophy, and health studies. While the expansion of narrative studies has led to significant advances across a number of fields, the travels for the concept itself have been a somewhat more complex. Has the concept of narrative passed intact from literature to sociology, from structuralism to therapeutic practice or to the study of everyday storytelling? In this volume, philosophers, psychologists, literary theorists, sociolinguists, and sociologists use methodologically challenging test cases to scrutinize the types, transformations, and trajectories of the concept and theory of narrative. The book powerfully argues that narrative concepts are profoundly relevant in the understanding of life, experience, and literary texts. Nonetheless, it emphasizes the vast contextual differences and contradictions in the use of the concept.

Bal's focus for this book is the idea that interdisciplinarity in the humanities - necessary, exciting, serious - must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than its methods.

This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality. The chapters scrutinize the capacity of translocality to describe, in new ways, the multiple mobilities, exchange practices and globalizing processes that link places, people and institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus with others in Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates.Illuminating translocality as a productive concept for studying cross‐regional connectivities and networks, this volume is an important contribution to a lively field of academic discourse. Following new directions in Area Studies, the chapters aim to overcome 'territorial containers' such as the nation‐state or local community, and instead emphasize the significance of processes of translation and negotiation for understanding how meaningful localities emerge beyond conventional boundaries.Structured by the four themes 'crossing boundaries', 'travelling ideas', 'social and economic movements' and 'pious endeavours', this volume proposes three conceptual approaches to translocality: firstly, to trace how it is embodied, narrated, virtualized or institutionalized within or in reference to physical or imagined localities; secondly, to understand locality as a relational concept rather than a geographically bounded unit; and thirdly, to consider cross‐border traders, travelling students, business people and refugees as examples of non-elite mobilities that provide alternative ways to think about what 'global' means today.Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas will be of interest to students and scholars of the anthropology, history and sociology of Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as for those interested in new approaches to Area Studies. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Bhikhu Parekh As creative and reflective agents, human beings seek meaning in their lives, and develop more or less coherent views of the world or cultures in terms of which to organize their personal and collective lives. When different groups of individuals within the same society subscribe to different ways of thought, they face the crucial question of how to deal with their cultural diversity and sustain a shared common life. Premodern societies took a relatively relaxed view of diversity and generally opted for a looser union. Modernity brought with it a very different approach to the subject. This is reflected in, among other things, the institution of the modern state, especially the liberal democracy which represents one way of constituting it. Liberal democracy has exercised a decisive influence on our political and moral imagination for the past three centuries. Unlike premodern societies which took the community as their starting point and defined the individual in terms of it, it takes the individual as the ultimate and irreducible unit of, and thus conc- tually and ontologically prior to society. The latter is taken to consist of in- viduals, and refers to the totality of its members and their formal and informal relationships. Individual are the sole and equal sources of moral claims, and social and political institutions are judged in terms of their ability to safeguard and promote individual interests.

This collection of essays is based on the cooperation between the Freiburg graduate school Factual and Fictional Narration and the Aarhus Centre of Fictionality Studies. It re-examines the much discussed fact―fiction distinction in light of the current burgeoning of research on fictionality.

How can we think more deeply about our travels? This was the question that inspired Emily Thomas' journey into the philosophy of travel. Part philosophical ramble, part travelogue, The Meaning of Travel begins in the Age of Discovery, when philosophers first started taking travel seriously. It meanders forward to consider Montaigne on otherness, John Locke on cannibals, and Henry Thoreau on wilderness. On our travels with Thomas, we discover the dark side of maps, how the philosophy of space fuelled mountain tourism, and why you should wash underwear in woodland cabins... We also confront profound issues, such as the ethics of 'doom tourism' (travel to 'doomed' glaciers and coral reefs), and the effect of space travel on human significance in a leviathan universe. The first ever exploration of the places where history and philosophy meet, this book will reshape your understanding of travel.