Analogies between Comparisons as Mechanisms of “Departicularization”? On the Construction of Resonances between Colonial and Metropolitan Formations of Comparisons in National “Founding Debates” in the German Empire (1871-1918). (F07#)

• Subject Area: Sociological Theory ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2022 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317664947

The project investigates social-scientific and missionary communities of practice in the German Empire that constructed analogies 1) between the “social question” in the metropole (and metropolitan comparisons of “bourgeois” vs. “workers”) and the “native question” in the colonies (and colonial comparisons of “Germans” and “natives”); and 2) between the “Kulturkampf” in the metropole (and metropolitan comparisons between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism”) and the religious situation in the colonies (and colonial comparisons between “European Christendom” and “Islam”). Building on Bourdieu’s theory of state-formation, the project hypothesizes that the confounding of these comparisons “departicularized” a bourgeois ideal of the good life and a Protestant norm of religious subjectivity as both became conflated with Germanness as such via contrasts to a “colonial other.”

• 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. Martin Petzke, since 1/2022; Dr. Ralf Rapior, since 1/2022