Engaging Transculturality is an extensive and comprehensive survey of the rapidly developing field of transcultural studies. In this volume, the reflections of a large and interdisciplinary array of scholars have been brought together to provide an extensive source of regional and trans-regional competencies, and a systematic and critical discussion of the field’s central methodological concepts and terms.

Based on a wide range of case studies, the book is divided into twenty-seven chapters across which cultural, social, and political issues relating to transculturality from Antiquity to today and within both Asian and European regions are explored. Key terms related to the field of transculturality are also discussed within each chapter, and the rich variety of approaches provided by the contributing authors offer the reader an expansive look into the field of transculturality.

Offering a wealth of expertise, and equipped with a selection of illustrations, this book will be of interest to scholars and students from a variety of fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Engaging transculturality / Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, Susan Richter

Delineating transculturality

Cultural hybridity and transculturality 1 / Axel Michaels

Asymmetry in transcultural interaction / Rudolf G. Wagner

Global connections in transcultural research: Thoughts from a historian’s perspective / Roland Wenzlhuemer

Not ‘cultures’, but culture! : The need for a transcultural perspective in archaeology / Joseph Maran

Civilization(s) : Use and abuse of a macro-historical category / Daniel G. König

Medieval concepts of migration and transculturality / Bernd Schneidmüller

Transculturality, or, how to find Europe beyond Eurocentrism / Madeleine Herren

Trancultural spaces and agents

Exploring the contact zone: A critical assessment from the perspective of early modern Euro-Ottoman history / Pascal Firges, Tobias P. Graf

Microcosm bazaar : Markets as places of cultural encounters and areas of conflict / Frank Grüner

Mobility, mediation and transculturation in the medieval Mediterranean : Migrating mercenaries and the challenges of mixing / Nikolas Jaspert

Transcultural temporalities

Transversal histories and transcultural afterlives : Indianized renditions of Jean Bodin in global intellectual history / Milinda Banerjee

Modern Arabic rhetorical manuals: A transcultural phenomenon / Jan Scholz

Migrant literary genres: Transcultural moments and scales of transculturality / Hans Harder

Transcultural semantics

Translating Jesuits: Translation as a useful tool to explore transculturality? 1 / Antje Flüchter

Islamic law with Chinese characteristics: Approaching cultural transfers through a functional theory / Roberta Tontini

Economies of the sacred in premodern Japan 1 / Anna Andreeva

Cultural heritage and architectural history between appropriation, substitution and translation : Plaster casts of Angkor Wat in a transcultural perspective / Michael Falser

Appropriation of effective and changing things : A prehistorian’s perspective 1 / Philipp W. Stockhammer

The vocation of indigenous knowledge and sciences as metaconcepts / Dhruv Raina

The transcultural lens

‘A very civil idea …’ : Art history and world-making – with and beyond the nation* / Monica Juneja

The problem with a geoaesthetic approach to the Indian Highway exhibition / Cathrine Bublatzky

Press powers: China, gender and the media in a global context / Barbara Mittler

Citizenship, hybridity and the post-colonial state in India / Subrata K. Mitra, Jivanta Schoettli, Markus Pauli

The transcultural turn in the study of ‘religion’ / Hans Martin Krämer

Emotion studies and transcultural studies / Max Stille

Affect beyond the human 1 : Indian agriculture in a multispecies world / Daniel Münster

Transforming knowledge : Concepts of transcultural studies and digital humanities / Armin Volkmann