GRK 473:  Travel Literature and Cultural Anthropology

• Subject Area: Linguistics
• Term: from 1998 to 2004
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 272595

The research training group focuses on man as a travelling and narrating being. It intends to compare models of travel in various cultural areas and in different cultural epochs from antiquity to the present. The topic of travel separates philologies from national bonds and puts the topographical fixation of cultures, their pictorial and textual archives in a general temporal and spacial context. Therefore, the College´s work allows a new combination of historically and anthropologically oriented questions, which are situated on the margins of traditional disciplines and fields of research.First of all, it is concerned with the connection of new ways of presentation and questions of genre - which have been relevant since travel literature became popular in the Late Middle Ages, if not earlier -, with processes of change in the field of social history. Yet, topics regarding the transformation of modes of perception and types of experience will also be stressed, especially in their connection with current debates in cultural anthropology.Numerous particular problems (e.g. the history of the text forms "travel guide" and "travel journal", religious travel and its secularization, travel specific to gender and generation, ritual symbolism of initiatory journeys) are suited for integrative and cross-disclipinary analysis within the framework of the College´s research training. This also includes patterns and practices of representation, which evolve in confrontation with foreign cultures and places, and are related to culturally specific forms of travel (aristocratic, scholarly, artistic) or to migration and generalizations of mobility, as it is the case for instance in modern mass tourism.In its second period (October 2001 to September 2004), the College again offers a long-term program which will encompass several disciplines and focus on media and cultural theory. Lectures, research colloquia, workshops and symposia will be organized in cooperation with international scholars and guests.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Universität Paderborn
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Gisela Ecker
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Ernst Bremer; Professorin Dr. Gisela Ecker; Professor Dr. Peter Freese (†); Professor Dr. Frank Göttmann; Professor Dr. Bernhard Lang; Professorin Dr. Jutta Langenbacher-Liebgott; Professorin Dr. Renate Schlesier; Professor Dr. Hartmut Steinecke (†)