World Comparison and World Knowledge: Ethnographic (Travel) Literature and Comparative Sciences (1850–1950) (D04 [B03])

• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317664947

The subproject studied practices of comparing in world travel literature in the late 18th and the 19th centuries when comparative sciences, natural history, and ethnographic practices were generating new procedures and narratives of comparing. We are now focusing on the further development of institutionalized forms of ethnography and travel literature as driving forces of modernity in Europe. We are studying what were then newly founded German-language journals that explored and combined comparative practices across a wide array of fields such as psychology, ethnology, philology, and travel literature (1850–1900), and we are focusing on French anthropology and ethnographic travel literature that tested and critically questioned the comparative methods developed in the scientific communities along with the comparability of cultural phenomena (1900–1950).

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1288: Practices of comparisons: Ordering and changing the world
• Applicant Institution: Universität Bielefeld
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Walter Erhart; Professorin Dr. Kirsten Kramer