Events - Conference/Workshop

Asymmetrical dependencies, esp. strong asymmetrical dependencies, substantially determine social relationships and interactions in the Ancient Near East (ANE) and in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT/HB). This basic feature not only characterizes human relationships but also the interactions between divine and human beings. In the ANE, these social, political and religious fields can neither be separated nor be discriminated neatly. Instead, religious, political and social norms, rationales, metaphors and actions intertwine and the fields interact constantly. At the same time, (strong) asymmetrical dependencies take very different forms and are operative on many different levels of society. The workshop will bring together scholars from the fields of ANE-Studies, Egyptology, Iconography and OT/HB Studies in order to work on these questions in a transdisciplinary perspective. Textual and material/iconographic sources from the ANE will be analysed from various methodological angles.

This workshop brings together historians and legal scholars to investigate potential scenarios and loci of conflict resolution through which late antique women of different types and status could access or facilitate justice, or were denied of doing so, from the courtroom proper to the household to religious communities. In particular, we aim to recover the role some women may have played as informal legal patrons, negotiators and arbitrators of justice for their dependents.

This Workshop is part of Research Area C, which explores forms of asymmetrical dependency produced at the crossroads of conflicting institutions, norms, and practices. The aim of the workshop is to reflect on how alternative routes define forms of dependency, and how forms of dependency determine the types of routes. This workshop will specifically look into context and contextualization, trading places and, thus, on entanglements and – so to say – “levels” of dependency and their definition. We can look on the agency of the people involved, both traders and trafficked, explaining in part local social relations of asymmetrical dependency. Slave routes continue to be understood and conceptionalized primarily as transatlantic or trans-Saharan.

The existence of slavery among the Maya is asserted in almost all publications, but no systematic effort has yet been undertaken to investigate slavery and other forms of asymmetrical dependency among the Maya on the basis of sources or material evidence. In fact, there is not a single publication on the subject. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that slaves were an important component of pre-Hispanic society, although their proportion in relation to other groups, such as dependent peasants & prisoners of war, has yet to be explored. The planned conference aims to lay the groundwork for a new understanding of slavery & asymmetrical dependency among the Maya from the preclassic period until the present. The aim of the conference is not only to trace the existence and structure of asymmetrical dependency relations among the Maya over a long durée, but also to reconstruct the different ontological conceptions underlying Maya and European ideas of slavery and dependency.

The institution of slavery lasted more than three centuries in Brazil, the last country to abolish black slavery in the Americas in 1888. This event aims to bring together some of the central debates on the cultural heritage of Afro-descendant slavery in Brazil, and a critical novelty is to propose the analysis of the intersections with the cultural heritage of indigenous slavery. The Brazilian academy is just beginning to explore these possible connections, and the event can be an essential contribution to the debate on the cultural heritage of slavery at the international level by bringing new perspectives. In this sense, the Conference brings together researchers and activists to debate topics on the intersections in the cultural heritage of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian slavery at parties, in the discussion of the last Constitution, in teaching, in filmic narratives, in museums and the politics of Repair.

A comparative conference, organized by Heinz Heinen Fellow Christian Laes, that will enable the audience to pay attention to voices often unheard, in language traditions often unknown, and therefore underexplored. Drawing on the expertise of scholars in ‘less studied languages’ (Armenian, Coptic, Ge’ez, Georgian, Turkish, Syriac) for the period concerned.

Workshop Series and Study Group “Anthropological Perspectives on Embodied Dependencies” Screening & Discussion of the documentary (58 minutes) In this session we will discuss the ways that music-making reflects the intertwined legacies of slavery and indentureship in Trinidad & Tobago. While historical animosities between Indian- and African-Trinidadians continue to fuel political and social divisions in the country, analysis of Trinbagonian music contrarily suggests that Indian- and African-Trinidadians have long exchanged musical ideas such that musics often considered solely “Indian” or “African” are in fact characterized by marked fusions of various styles. In this way, music-making can be read like an archive of colonial and postcolonial intimacies. We will watch the documentary “Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora” and discuss it with its director Chris Ballengee, who is an ethnomusicologist based in Poland and scholar of Indo-Caribbean culture.

Even after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman law and legal terminology remained formative for late antique and early medieval societies. Their influence can, for instance, be observed with regard to slavery and other dependency relations. The Roman legal terminology to denote a person’s legal inferiority (like servus, ancilla, puer, colonus, famulus etc.) often appears in late antique and early medieval sources and thus suggests the continued relevance of the concepts connected to these terms. However, it is far from clear to what extent the use of identical terminology actually indicates the conformity of the phenomena described. For while particularly normative sources do indeed suggest the continued existence of chattel slavery and related legal practices, like e.g. the manumissio in ecclesia, they also point to the emergence of new forms of asymmetrical dependency.

This bilingual workshop aims at approaching concepts of dependency, loyalty, and belonging in early modern Ottoman society. We will focus not only on slave-slave owner relationships, but also on patronage, servitude, dependency on religion or on places of belonging, and more. By analyzing the lives and stories of individuals or social groups in the private and public spheres, we hope to draw some conclusions about strong asymmetrical dependencies as they developed in early modern Ottoman society.

The workshop wants to analyze slavery and other forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies in Ottoman South Eastern Europe. We look to the Ottoman Empire from different angles and are thus interested not only in an Istanbul-centered perspective, but also in studies concerning regional aspects in its European provinces and border-regions – from the Crimean Khanate to Dalmatia, from Hungary to Crete, including connections with neighbouring regions

In the past, most studies on pre-Roman societies in Italy (1st millennium BCE) focused on the elites, their representation and cultural contacts. Recently, however, research on dependent and marginalized social groups has considerably increased. The aim of this conference is to look at these less visible social groups, which are often even difficult to define (slaves, servants, freedmen, peasants, women, children etc.). The methodological challenges connected to the study of such heterogeneous and scattered sources will be addressed. Is the evidence representative enough for defining different forms of dependencies? Can we rely on written and pictorial sources or do they only reflect Greek and Roman views and iconographic conventions? Which social groups can’t be traced in the literary and archaeological record? For the discussion of this topic, we will focus on the following sections: historical and epigraphical studies, material culture studies, anthropology and bioarchaeology.

Conference on July 6–8, 2022 at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies organized by Claudia Jarzebowski, BCDSS, and Pia Wiegmink, BCDSS, Susanne Lettow (FU Berlin) and Heike Raphael-Hernandez (University of Würzburg). Check out Jennifer Morgan's Keynote Speech "The Measure of their Sadness: Slavery, Kinship and the Marketplace in the Early Black Atlantic" on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ct_z1bd-lrg

The conference is intended to contribute to this assessment of knowledge about slavery in Africa and to take stock of the most recent significant scientific advances. Eight years after the conference "Slavery in Africa: Past, Legacies and Present," (SLAFCO) held at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (Nairobi, 2014), this initiative benefits from the work developed in the European project, "Slavery in Africa: A Dialogue Between Europe and Africa," (SLAFNET, H2020 RISE, 2017-2022), as well as from a scientific ecosystem enriched by several collective initiatives. With an approach promoting interdisciplinary scientific dialogue (history, anthropology, sociology, museology) and dialogue with civil society (through the attendance of anti-slavery associations), the ambition here is to continue efforts to break down barriers between the various regions of the African continent, their historiographies and their stakeholders.

The conference "Humboldt-Kolleg: Slavery, Freedom, Sustainability, and Pandemicis" is organized by Roberto Hofmeister Pich and supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Three of our Cluster members Michael Zeuske, Stephan Conermann, and Karoline Noack, will be giving a presentation.

The workshop aims at approaching the contested heritage of slavery and memory politics in the Caribbean states from an interregional and multidisciplinary perspective, including history, social and cultural anthropology, and social sciences. It asks key questions such as: What role does transatlantic slavery play in the cultural heritage of the cities and rural communities? Which legacies are identified and remembered in public or private spaces – and how, where, by whom, and for what purpose? To what extent is the public commemoration of colonizers and enslavers by means of statues, national holidays or school books contested? How does the contested heritage relate to the memory sites dedicated to the enslaved and to those who fought slavery and colonial oppression?

The Conference is looking to explore the connection between the phenomenon of dependency and the realm of the supernatural (God, angels, demons) in late antique and early medieval Christianity.

As part of the activities of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) of the University of Bonn, in collaboration with the European research program SLAFNET and the Center for Research on Slavery and Indenture Studies (CRSI) of the University of Mauritius, we are organizing a workshop on digital humanities on slavery.

This international conference brings together specialist from different disciplines, focusing on a number of regions of Asia, such as India, Nepal, Tibet, the Silk Route, China and Japan. All experts conduct research on extreme forms of dependencies, in which artists, craftspeople and their communities find themselves, as well as on the freedoms they find within their situations.

In the context of the global Cultural Heritage boom, where local, national, and global identity constructions are involved and intertwined with interests in cultural tourism, sites of memory of colonialism and slavery related with notions of accountability or liability are a field of social conflicts. The tensions between different groups of actors and interests around the central issue of how to deal with the slavery past and the legacies of the enslavers and colonizers became visible in the global Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020 and found their expression in the toppling of statues and monuments. The workshop approaches these topics from an interdisciplinary perspective including scholars, museum experts, and scholarly activists working on the European context.

The workshop seeks to explore the potential as well as the limits of textual sources within approaches to a (comparative) analysis of these structures. Fictional and non-fictional narratives across different text types and genres provide insights into the experience of asymmetrical dependency, into justifications drawn upon to maintain asymmetrical dependency as well as into attempts to abolish or modify these structures. In the workshop on “Narratives of Dependency” scholars from a wide range of disciplines – including Literary Studies, Egyptology, Theology, American Studies and Anthropology as well as Ancient, Eastern European and Ottoman History – discuss narratives addressing asymmetrical dependency in terms of their contexts, structures and potential functions.

The purpose of this workshop is to explore the relationship between lost documents and archives and Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies (SADs) in post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean through uniting the research of the BCDSS with the international working group on 'Lost Documents and Archives in the Middle Ages.' Both research groups take as a working hypothesis that archives of SADs privilege records of those in power and aim to investigate how we can use "evidence of absence" as historical evidence. The exchange will focus on the question of lost documents and non-elites, asking 1) how patterns of loss shape our evidence of non-elites, and 2) how those patterns may nonetheless contribute to our understanding of non-elites, especially those under the heaviest conditions of dependence.