2022 - 2024

Knowledge about the Orient is insufficient in Europe and limited by one-sidedness: insufficient because the general image of the Orient is broadly determined by a limited set of Western colonial powers, and one-sided because historical interrelations have been ignored and reduced to images of the so-called Other, which were shaped by power-political interests.

This project investigates the knowledge of the Orient in a novel way. By changing the perspective from the impoverished view of the Orient, which was limited by imperialist approaches, to global interactions and interrelations, it substantially broadens the scope of investigation. Now it includes both warlike conflicts and sieges as well as the peaceful exchange of people, ideas and goods. This change of perspective brings to light a hitherto largely hidden relational history, the reconstruction of which is the central goal of this project.

Project leader:
Johann Heiss (ISA), Johannes Feichtinger (IKT)

Cooperations:
Cooperation between IKT and ISA, Coordination of a research network in connection with the research group "History of the Austrian Academy of Sciences 1847-2022"

Duration:
1.1.2020-31.12.2023

Financing:
Austrian Academy of Sciences, City of Vienna (MA 7)

In their past, the Kurds have faced many hardships, ranging from the denial of their ethnic identity and their hopes of building a nation state, to violations of their human rights, severe acts of punishment, as well as persecution, forced migration, deportation, and acts of genocide and ethnocide. All these are crucial aspects for the shaping of Kurdish history, self-awareness identity processes and belonging. This project aims to explore memory-building processes in the Kurdish transnation, which includes the Kurds in the different nation states of their homelands, as well as Kurdish diasporic and transnational communities. The dynamics of both remembering and forgetting the past will be investigated in an innovative manner.
The hypothesis of this project is that today’s experience of the past in the Kurdish transnation has not only been shaped by the different kinds of political exclusions, persecutions and human rights violations that the Kurds have experienced, but also by intra-ethnic cultural diversity, internal power relations, and their integration into different states. Due to new communication technologies, it seems that new ways of dealing with the past are in the making, resulting in various impacts on the Kurdish transnation in general and on individuals in particular. The project will explore the differences, commonalities and dynamics of memory-building in the Kurdish homelands and diasporas, which not only involve strategies of coping with the past but are interlinked with identity-building processes in general. It is the aim of the project to trace the ways that remembering and forgetting have developed using a descriptive, a phenomenological, and a comparative approach. The project explores the long-term effects of mass violence in Kurdish society, in its inter-generational relations, and in intra- and inter-ethnic processes. The application of anthropological methods helps to examine these effects in both the original and subsequent generations, and to achieve new insights into how violent experiences are coped with. A comparative approach enables a view of the general direction of the long-term impact of these events on this society. Three cases have been chosen for the investigation: the persecution of the Yezidi Kurds during WWI, the mass atrocities against the Alevi Kurds in Dersim 1937/38, and the Anfal Operations (1988/89) against the Kurds in Iraq. The focus on different sub-groups and time-frames enables the analysis of memory-building processes in different temporalities, territorial settings in political discourses and social frameworks. The application of multiple methodological approaches, namely, intensive archive studies, multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, and comparisons within and between trans-national spaces, will shed new light on the dynamics and strategies of modes of remembrance, as well as the intersections in and interrelatedness between memoryscapes in multiple modernities.

Project leader:
Maria Six-Hohenbalken

Duration:
01.05.2013 - 31.12.2023

Financing:
Elise Richter Projekt (FWF), core-funding

For decades individuals and families in Palestine have been confronted with an occupation that deprived them of their basic humanitarian rights. In spite of the stagnation in most areas to change these political and military conditions, Palestinian society has begun to develop alternative means of counter-culture. The present project focuses on the role of humor in art within the discourse of resistance that has proliferated in Palestine. It explores through an anthropological lens, the social-political and cultural dynamics behind these forms of resistance in Palestine, and their underlying motives, by analyzing selected key examples of humorous art.

Project leader:
Noura Kamal

Duration:
1.11.2019-31.10.2023

Financing:
FWF (P 32362-G) - Stand-Alone project

Introduced, edited and annotated by Sacha Alsancakli and Mustafa Dehqan
Kurdish Studies Series editor: Maria Six-Hohenbalken.

The Sharaf-nāma is a well-known history of Kurdish dynasties and ruling houses, written in Persian in 1005-7/1596-99 by Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī (949-1009/1543-1600), leader of the Rōzhikī tribe and amir of Bidlīs, southwest of Lake Van, in northern Kurdistan. The Sharaf-nāma is, without a doubt, the single most important source for Kurdish history before the contemporary era; however, there is to this day no critical edition of this essential text. The edition by Vladimir Veliaminov-Zernov, published in St. Petersburg in 1860-62, remains the reference work to this day. Another much used edition is the Cairo edition of Muḥammad ‘Alī ‘Awnī (1930), which was reprinted in 1964-65 in Tehran by Muḥammad ‘Abbasī, who added a new introduction. This volume is intended for publication within the Kurdish Studies Series, (Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences). The manuscript will comprise about 700 pages (including bibliography, index, tables chronology, critical notes) plus 50 – 100 images (partly in colour).

In terms of translation, the first substantial publication on the Sharaf-nāma was the work of the Dr. Heinrich Alfred Barb, director of the Oriental Academy (now Diplomatic Academy) in Vienna. In five articles published between 1853 and 1860, he gave an overview of the general characteristics and contents of the work and fully translated the books I, II and IV. H. A. Barb had had a manuscript copy of the Sharaf-nāma made for his own use in Jumadà I 1263/April-May 1847, while he was traveling in southeast Kurdistan; this manuscript is now kept at the library of the University of Vienna, with the reference number III.11697. H. A. Barb’s series of articles appeared a decade before the publication of the French translation by François Bernard Charmoy, in 1868-75.

For his edition, V. Veliaminov-Zernov studied six Sharaf-nāma manuscripts, and M. ‘Alī ‘Awnī added two more for the Cairo edition. To these eight manuscripts, we can add three manuscripts studied by François Bernard Charmoy for his French translation, arriving at a number of 11 manuscripts. Out of these 11 manuscripts, the very important Dorn 306 manuscript, dated Shawwāl 1007/May 1599, was studied, but two other equally important manuscripts, Elliott 332 (dated end of 1005/mid-1597) and Hunt. Don. 13 (dated Muḥarram 1007/Aug.-September 1598) were left out. Furthermore, these earlier editions do not contain a critical apparatus.

In view of these facts, the need for a new edition of the Sharaf-nāma is obvious. Based on the manuscripts of the work kept in various libraries worldwide, a critical edition is necessary for this foundational text, which remains a hallmark for the study of Kurdish history in the premodern and modern periods. This edition will be realised by Sacha Alsancakli (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) and Mustafa Dehqan (University of Toronto), two specialists of the Sharaf-nāma who have each spent more than ten years studying the text, and publishing many articles on the subject in the process.

This edition of the Sharaf-Nāma will be based on 36 extant manuscripts of the book. It will be composed of an Introduction, the edited text containing all remarkable variants from the different manuscripts, and extensive endnotes detailing every aspect of the work, such as sources, place names, historical figures, concepts, etc. As Appendixes, the work will include a Catalogue, including plates from most of the manuscripts, a Stemma Codicum and Documents on Sharaf Khān, the book’s author. This edition should become the new reference edition for the Sharaf-nāma.

Project leader:
Maria Six-Hohenbalken

Duration:
03/2020 - 09/2023

Financing:
Sponsoring, Third Party Funding Acquisition

This project will investigate how mobilities take shape in conjunction with environmental crisis following the earthquake of September 2018 in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia and its aftermath.

Disasters are anything but “natural”; instead, they emerge from the historical relations and processes among humans and environments. This project is not the story of a disaster, but rather the earthquake and its aftermath will serve as a focusing event to explore the complex interrelations of life and landscapes in the region across time. It will investigate plural framings  (cultural, religious, technocratic, environmental, etc.) of these events by inquiring about mobilities of people, things and ideas in relation to the environment. For instance, the settlement patterns in the region actually moved away from the coast and the Palu-Koro fault region, while colonial power dictated precisely that these areas were to be worked and populated. Mangroves protect shorelines from waves and erosions. As they disappear, the project asks what kind of relations to this ecosystem can be found.

The research will look at who moves and who stays after a disaster. How does the influx of goods and capital during the humanitarian response affect power asymmetries and gender dynamics? Where do particular ideas of risk come from and what local trajectories do they take on?

Socio-environmental frictions are the contact zones where, for instance, people interact with a body of water in a new way or where state authorities regulate what species of trees to protect. In this sense, the project will continue the work of social scientists proposing ways to analytically go beyond the culture-nature divide. A central aim of this project is to generate an anthropological account of a growing public discussion linking climate change, environmental degradation, disasters and human mobility.

PhD-Project:
Daniela Paredes Grijalva

Supervisor:
Martin Slama

Duration:
1.2.2020-31.1.2023

Financing:
AAS DOC

Building crafts emerge from the ongoing interaction between relatively stable local knowledge, skills and materials, and more dynamic external influences. This project focuses on the processes and effects involved in the contemporary transformation of building crafts in Himalayan vernacular architecture, where such traditions still predominate but where they are undergoing a period of accelerating change and decline. A wide range of dynamic natural and anthropogenic conditions (such as material resources, climate, and socio-economic factors) give rise to various patterns of adaptation. Focusing on carefully selected regions with strong local building craft traditions, this project explores these transformations and their drivers at the level of building structures, techniques and materials, as well as the social frameworks within which construction takes place and meaning is assigned to the built environment.

Project leader:
Hubert Feiglstorfer

Collaborators:
Calum Blaikie, Tsering Drongshar

Duration:
01.07.2020 – 30.11.2022

Financing:
Innovationsfonds „Forschung, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft“, ÖAW

In the late 10th century, during the period which became known in Tibet as the ‘Later Spread of Buddhism’ (bstan pa’i phyi dar), Buddhism was revived in Central Tibet and introduced into Western Tibet as a state religion. Closely following the proclamation of a Buddhist constitution by the ruler of Western Tibet in the form of two royal edicts (986 and 988), the foundation of four central Buddhist monasteries was begun, simultaneously in all cases in 996 in major areas of the West Tibetan kingdom. At the same time also in border areas of the kingdom, the construction of a number of Buddhist temples and monasteries started. Concomitant with these foundation processes, the social and economic order of the whole society was re-organised and rigorously structured according to Buddhist concepts.

In this project, based on work by the late Guge Tsering Gyalpo and in collaboration with Tsering Drongshar and Christiane Kalantari, various new textual, historical, and art-historical information relating to these early West Tibetan Buddhist monuments and their foundation by members of the royal West Tibetan lineage is examined from a social-anthropological perspective. This concerns, for example, two important historical textual sources authored by Guge Paṇḍita Drakpa Gyaltsen (1415-1486), the “Royal Genealogy of the Solar Lineage” (Nyi ma’i rigs kyi rgyal rabs) and the “Extended Biography of the Royal Lama Yeshe Ö” (lHa bla ma Ye shes ’od rnam thar rgyas pa). The foundation of the West Tibetan kingdom, its antecedents and an account of the royal lineage of West Tibet are some of the topics treated in the first text while the second is dedicated to the life and activities of perhaps the most important and influential person in the early history of Western Tibet, who according to all relevant sources was responsible for the Buddhist transformation of Western Tibet in the late 10th/early 11th century. New information is also studied and prepared for publication on the main temple of Nyarma (Ladakh), a stela in Kyuwang (Tsamda District, TAR, China) related to the Great Translator (lo chen) Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055) and the monumental stela in Chokro (lCog ro) (Purang District, TAR, China).

Project leader:
Christian Jahoda

Cooperations:
Tsering Drongshar, Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS), University of Vienna; Christiane Kalantari, ISA

Duration:
1.1.2019-31.03.2022

Financing:
core-funding, private foundations