Project Details
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
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
Applicant Institution
Universität Bielefeld
Project Heads
Professor Dr. Martin Petzke, since 1/2022; Dr. Ralf Rapior, since 1/2022