Travels, transmissions and transformations deals with mobile technologies and their impact on cultural interaction, as well as origins and the formation of cultural identities in order to contextualize the former projects.
This project is divided into two subprojects:
- Travelling technologies and ideas.
- The dialectic between interaction and identity formation/ethnicities.
Travelling technologies and ideas
The project will examine the cultural origin of the spoke wheel technology (chariots) and specify and compare its ideological impact across a large part of Europe.
The dialectic between interaction and identity formation/ethnicities
It is possible to delimit various forms of social and ultimately ethnic identity, through a careful analysis of the geographical distribution of social institutions and the symbolic meaning of their material culture. Based on this, the formation, consolidation and dissolution of cultural and ethnic identities in material culture will be studied in order to gain insight into the historical long-term processes of these concepts. It includes a better understanding of the relationship between processes of hybridization and of homogenization in the formation of cultural identities.