Agents of Transculturation

Border-Crossers, Mediators, Go-Betweens
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-3-8309-3002-0
Verlag: Waxmann Verlag

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 316 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 604 g

Reihe: Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship

Ever since antiquity, but increasingly since the global transformation of the world order in the early modern period, communication between members of different cultural groups depended on translators, diplomats, traders, and other specialists with a knowledge of both cultures. Successful communication and traffic relied on the mediating agency of persons who had been exposed, often in their childhood or through captivities, to the customs and languages of both cultures involved in the contact. Other border crossers and go-betweens acted as missionaries, traders, political refugees, beachcombers, pirates, anthropologists, actors in zoos, runaway slaves, and itinerant doctors. Because of their frequently precarious lives, the written traces left by these figures are often thin. While some of their lives have to be carefully reconstructed through critical readings of the documents left by others (frequently by their enemies), others have left autobiographical texts which allow for a richer assessment of their function as cultural border crossers and mediators.
With examples covering from various historical periods between the early modern period and the present, as well as geographical areas such as the Mediterranean, Africa, the Americas, Hawaii, New Zealand and northern Europe, scholars from various disciplines and methodological backgrounds – reaching from history to religious studies and from literary studies to ethnology – fathom the intricacies of in-betweenness and reflect on the impact which "agents of transculturation" have in situations of cultural, social and political encounters.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jobs, Sebastian

Mackenthun, Gesa

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Kultureller Wandel, Kulturkontakt, Akkulturation

Über Autor(innen)

Jobs, Sebastian
Sebastian Jobs is post-doctoral fellow at the Graduate School “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” in Rostock and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Erfurt, Germany.
Sebastian Jobs, Dr. phil. (2009, Universität Erfurt), Historiker; seit 2015 Juniorprofessor am John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien (FU Berlin); davor Postdoc an der FU Berlin, Universität Rostock und dem Deutschen Historischen Institut in Washington, DC; Studium der Geschichtswissenschaft in Erfurt, Beloit, WI und Berkeley, CA. Forschungsschwerpunkte: US-Geschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Sklaverei, Gerüchte, Politische Aufführungen und Rituale, Geschichte und Erinnerungspolitik.

Mackenthun, Gesa
Gesa Mackenthun is professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her books include Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire (1997), Fictions of the Black Atlantic (2004), and the co-edited volumes Decolonizing ‘Prehistory’. Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (with Christen Mucher, 2021), Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (with Bernhard Klein, 2004), Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference (with Klaus Hock, 2012), and DEcolonial Heritage: Natures, Cultures and the Asymmetries of Memory (with Aníbal Arregui, 2017). Her current research deals with representations of the transatlantic history of enclosures, evictions, and ecocide.