Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting (...) meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts. (shrink)

Young children learn to make sense of the world through mimetic processes. These processes are focused to begin with on their parents, brothers and sisters and people they know well. Young children want to become like these persons. They are driven by the desire to become like them, which will mean that they belong and are part of them and their world. Young children, and indeed humans in general are social beings. They, more than all non-human primates, are social beings (...) who cannot survive without the Other. In mimetic processes the outside world becomes the inner world and the inner world becomes the outside world. The imaginary is developed and the imaginary develops ways of relating to the outside world. In a mimetic loop, this in turn affects the inner world of the imaginary. These processes are sensory and governed by desire. All the senses are involved which means that the imaginary has multiple layers. Since there is an intermingling of images, emotions and language, these processes are rooted in the body and at the same time transcend the body as they become part of the imaginary. Human beings create images of themselves in all cultures and historical periods. They need these images to understand themselves and their relationship to other human beings and to develop social relations and communities. Images of the human being are designs and projections of the human being and his or her relationship to other people and to the world. They are formed to visualize representations of individuals or aspects of them. They arise when we communicate about ourselves. They support us to live with diversities and to develop similarities and feelings of belonging with other people. They are the result of complex anthropological processes, in which social and cultural power structures play an important role. (shrink)

Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting (...) meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts. (shrink)

Paradigms of anthropology -- Evolution-hominization-anthropology -- Philosophical anthropology -- Anthropology in the historical sciences: historical anthropology -- Cultural anthropology -- Historical cultural anthropology -- Core issues of anthropology -- The body as a challenge -- The mimetic basis of cultural learning -- Theories and practices of the performative -- The rediscovery of rituals -- Language-the antinomy between the universal and the particular -- Images and imagination -- Death and recollection of birth -- Future prospects.

This volume develops a unique framework to understand India through indigenous and European perspectives, and examines how it copes with the larger challenges of a globalized world. Through a discussion of religious and philosophical traditions, cultural developments as well as contemporary theatre, films and media, it explores the manner in which India negotiates the trials of globalization. It also focuses upon India’s school and education system, its limitations and successes, and how it prepares to achieve social inclusion. The work further (...) shows how contemporary societies in both India and Europe deal with cultural diversity and engage with the tensions between tendencies towards homogenization and diversity. This eclectic collection on what it is to be a part of global network will be of interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, philosophy, sociology, culture studies, and religion. (shrink)

Davon ausgehend, dass Natur und Kultur das gemeinsame Erbe des Menschen bilden, wird dargestellt, was wir unter dem Anthropozän verstehen. Es werden die ungewollten Wirkungen der Industrialisierung und Modernisierung untersucht. Dazu gehören der Klimawandel, die Zerstörung der Biodiversität, die gestörten biogeochemischen Kreisläufe, die Versauerung der Ozeane und die Verschmutzung des Planeten mit der Gefahr der Zerstörung der Lebensgrundlagen der Menschen, Tiere und Pflanzen. Welche Rolle spielen in diesem Prozess die Maschinen? Ohne ihre Erfindung wäre es nicht zu diesem Prozess mit (...) seinen zahlreichen Nebenwirkungen gekommen. Ihre Entwicklung reicht von der Dampfmaschine über die Prothetik bis zur Robotik. Ein wichtiger Motor der Entwicklung sind heute die digitale Kultur und die Künstlichen Intelligenz. Lassen sich diese auch für die nachhaltige Entwicklung nutzen? Ohne die Digitalisierung wäre es nicht zu den Entwicklungen der Gentechnologie gekommen. Mit der Erfindung und Nutzung der CRISPR-Technologie werden Eingriffe in die Evolution möglich, die sich als eine Zuspitzung der Dynamik des Anthropozäns begreifen lassen. Gibt es Möglichkeiten, die Gefährdungen und die negativen Auswirkungen dieser Entwicklungen zu vermeiden oder sie sogar zu kompensieren? Hier entstehen viele nicht einfach beantwortbare anthropologische Fragen, die für ein historisch und kulturell reflexives (Selbst-)Verständnis des Menschen von zentraler Bedeutung sind. (shrink)

(2003). Perfecting the Individual: Wilhelm von Humboldt's concept of anthropology, Bildung and mimesis. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 241-249.

The first part of the article (§§ 1-3) illustrates the critical relation the authors establish with the leading figures of philosophical anthropology in terms of their engagement with “world-openness” (Weltoffenheit). This notion cannot be reduced to the objectivity that confronts man as a spiritual being, as in Max Scheler, but rather makes it possible to grasp the limits of distancing objectification; in Arnold Gehlen, the coercion to action derived from the indeterminacy of man’s relation with the world is not sufficient (...) to comprehend the role of culture for the constitution of the human animal itself; and with the biological means utilized by Helmuth Plessner it is not possible to account entirely for the human capacity to establish relations by means of society. Historical anthropology, as the second part (§§ 4-5) of the article shows, aims to respond to such deficiencies by bringing to light the numerous historical and cultural forms of openness to a plurality of worlds. Freeing itself of any abstract and binding anthropological norm that claims to define the essence of man, historical anthropology investigates human structures and phenomena through a series of transdisciplinary studies centering on themes such as the body, ritual, mimesis and the performative dimension in its entirety, performance and performativity. (shrink)

In this article Cristoph Wulf examines the basic concepts of pedagogy and educational science in the German-speaking world, looking at education and socialization from the perspective of educational anthropology. He makes evident that the complex German concept of Bildung, in particular, can only be fully understood by means of a historical and philosophical analysis.

In this interdisciplinary anthology, essays study the relationship between the imagination and images both material and mental.

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 1 Seiten: 13-19.

Bringing together historical and cultural perspectives on the senses, and their association with body, emotion, cultural memory and tradition, this book examines the significance of senses in the understanding of the world and the self. Further, in comparing Indian and western theories of senses, it highlights the anthropological, philosophical and religious underpinnings of our engagement with a changing world, globalization, and new media.

There is no doubt that it is in Germany that educational science developed as a scientific discipline in its own right when humanist pedagogics, empirical ...

(2003). Perfecting the Individual: Wilhelm von Humboldt's concept of anthropology, Bildung and mimesis. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 241-249.

Die thematisch breit gefächerte Reihe umfasst Schriften zur Kunst- und Bildwissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte und Philosophie.

First published in 1989, Looking Back on the End of the World raises provocative questions about the possibilities of critical knowledge in social systems that seem to have "surpassed history." Unlike recent works that make history end with the consumer, or project the conflict between the capitalist and the oppressed into the future, the writers in these essays perform a much more basic task: they argue that we can now think through the "end of the world." The idea of a (...) "unified world," they claim, has given way to new sensibilities about history. The essays evaluate current negative obsessions such as apocalypse and the elimination of difference, and offer positive approaches to the "gamble of thinking" required in a society without traditional subjects and institutions. Capitalism, the book argues, has changed all the rules of the game, and any nostalgia for "starting" from the familiar in terms of intellectual critique is doomed. Collectively, the authors sketch the unfamiliarity of the new, those moments when our categories dissolve in the face of connections and relations that announce all sorts of "ends." And other things besides. (shrink)

The background of the conflict study presented in part II consists of ten transdisciplinary and transcultural anthropological studies based on the paradigm of historical anthropology. On this basis, the “Berlin Ritual and Gesture Study” financed by the German Research Foundation was carried out. This 12 years lasting research project examined the role of rituals and gestures in the major fields of socialization “family”, “school”, “peer-group” and “media” in the context of a Berlin inner city primary school. It provided the conceptual (...) and methodological starting point for the exploration of the possible beginning of a mobbing conflict and the difficulties to handle it. In this study, a methodology of ethnography of education was developed which served as basis for the analysis of the mobbing process in Part II. (shrink)

Für den interkulturellen Dialog zwischen den europäischen Ländern und ihren muslimischen Nachbarn spielen die Künste eine zentrale Rolle. Jede Kunst hat eine ihr eigene Sprache entwickelt, die den Menschen hilft, in Beziehung zueinander zu treten und sich auszutauschen. Die Künste geben den Kulturen die Möglichkeit sich auszudrücken und tragen zur Entstehung kultureller Identität bei. Sie formen die Wahrnehmungen, Erinnerungen, Vorstellungen und damit das individuelle und kollektive Imaginäre. In ihnen erfahren die Menschen die Alterität anderer Kulturen und ihrer selbst und werden (...) dadurch gebildet. Die Künste sind nicht nur den Angehörigen ihrer Kultur, sondern allen Menschen zugänglich. Sie vermitteln heterologische Erfahrungen und haben daher für die Verständigung zwischen den verschiedenen Kulturen eine große Bedeutung. Zu den Autoren gehören Kulturwissenschaftler und Philosophen aus europäischen und muslimischen Ländern: Radwa Ashour, Hans Belting, Benmeziane Bencherki, Roland Bernecker, Christina von Braun, Paolo Fabbri, Lydia Goehr, Gertrud Koch, Klaus Krüger, Mustapha Larissa, Reyés Mate, Hamdi Mehrez, Marie-José Mondzain, Angelika Neuwirth, Ludgar Schwarte, Antoine Seif, Philippe Tancelin, Jacques Poulain, Fathi Triki, Rachida Triki, Hassan Wahibi,Christoph Wulf, Mohamed Zouzi-Chebbi. (shrink)

Demokratische Lebensbedingungen sind nur möglich, wenn Menschen mit Hilfe von Erziehung und Bildung über die Fähigkeit verfügen, ihre gesellschaftlichen, sozialen und kulturellen Verhältnisse so zu gestalten, dass sie sich an den menschlichen Grundrechten orientieren. Erziehung und Bildung dürfen nicht auf die Maximierung von Leistungsfähigkeit, Demokratie und gesellschaftliches Zusammenleben nicht auf die bloße Befolgung von Gesetzen und Regeln reduziert werden. Erziehung und Bildung umfassen wissen lernen, handeln lernen, zusammenleben lernen und sein lernen. Gelingende Demokratie zielt auf Lebens-, Interaktions-, Kommunikationsverhältnisse, die sich (...) an den Werten gesellschaftliche Sicherheit, soziale Gerechtigkeit und Nachhaltigkeit orientieren und zugleich für neue individuelle und soziale Entwicklungen offen sind. Infolge der Globalisierung und des Neoliberalismus sind Demokratien und ihre Bildungssysteme in den europäischen, muslimischen und arabischen Ländern in Gefahr, den Reichtum und die Vielfalt ihrer Werte und Lebensformen auf die Realisierung enger religiöser Vorstellungen, die Durchsetzung politischer und ökonomischer Herrschaft und die Überbetonung zweckrationalen Denkens und Handelns zu reduzieren. Dagegen bestehen die Autoren und Autorinnen dieses Bandes auf der Notwendigkeit partizipatorischer Erziehungs- und Bildungsprozesse, die die Entwicklung von Subjekten und Gemeinschaften fördern und in denen Menschen lernen, ihre individuellen und gesellschaftlichen Lebensbedingungen in kultureller Diversität demokratisch zu gestalten. (shrink)

Der Beitrag untersucht, welche Rolle Glaubenssysteme im Anthropozän spielen. Behandelt wird einmal das Glaubenssystem, auf dessen Grundlage alle Fakten und Argumente so organisiert und interpretiert werden, dass sie dazu beitragen, die negativen Auswirkungen des Anthropozäns zurückzuweisen. Der Schwerpunkt des Artikels liegt jedoch auf den Glaubenssystemen, in deren Rahmen umfangreiche Forschungen nachweisen, dass große Teile der Menschheit für die Fehlentwicklungen im Anthropozän verantwortlich sind. Eine „dunkelgrüne Religion“ beeinflusst die Wahrnehmung, Untersuchung und Interpretation der Natur und begründet die Kritik an den negativen (...) Entwicklungen unter Bezug auf religiöse Glaubens- und Referenzsysteme. Sodann werden sakralen Formen der Kritik beschrieben, wie sie z.B. in der Bewegung „Fridays for Future“ sichtbar werden. Deutlich wird dabei, dass grundlegende Veränderungen gesellschaftlichen Verhaltens in Glaubenssystemen verankert sein müssen, um die intendierte Wirksamkeit zu entfalten. (shrink)

I will focus on dances as performances that bring a knowledge of man and his body to the representation, which would not be visible and comprehensible without it. Dances will be conceived of as patterns in which collectively shared knowledge and collectively shared body practices are staged and performed, and in which a self-expression and self-interpretation of a common order takes place. These are productive, and not reproductive, activities that create communities and cultural identities—namely, by working through difference and alterity.

Material objects play a central role in the development of human beings. The following paper reconstructs their importance in the testimony of a holocaust survivor. Materials play an important role in the formation of the lifeworld. In a concentration camp, they often gain an unexpected existential importance. According to the context clothes, wood, food, earth change their meaning for the detainees. The kind of clothes corresponds with the type of camp and may be an indicator for the chances to survive. (...) In a concentration camp, a piece of wood can either be used to heat a room in extreme cold and contribute to the survival of a detainee or to beat and torture a prisoner. Finally, the materiality of food is experienced as a prerequisite of life; its absence is a threat, its availability a hope for survival. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 2 Seiten: 183-191.

À la suite de Penser l’Europe , la thèse suivante est avancée : aujourd’hui, la formation culturelle en Europe n’est plus seulement une tâche nationale mais bien une tâche interculturelle. Ce n’est qu’en s’adonnant à celle-ci que les systèmes culturels européens peuvent donner à la génération suivante la capacité de concevoir de manière productive les deux tendances qui déterminent la mondialisation : l’homogénéisation et la diversité culturelle. Dans ce processus, il s’agit avant tout d’apprendre à affronter l’étrangéité ou bien encore (...) l’altérité. Il faut comprendre que les formes européennes du logocentrisme, de l’égocentrisme et de l’ethnocentrisme véhiculent un danger, celui de réduire la rencontre avec l’étranger à quelque chose de connu au lieu de nous y apprendre quelque chose, d’y apprendre à supporter un certain degré de non compréhension de l’étranger et de non-identité, d’y apprendre une pensée hétérologique. Dans le processus de formation interculturelle, il y va d’incertitude et de complexité, de différence et de transgression, il s’agit de vivre avec un nombre croissant de formes culturelles hybrides.Following Thinking Europe , the thesis is advanced today, cultural training in Europe is not only a national task but a task intercultural. It is only engaged in this European cultural systems that can give the next generation the ability to develop into productive two trends that shape globalization and homogenization of cultural diversity. In this process, it is first of all learn to face or even the strangeness of otherness. It is understood that the European forms of logocentrism, of egocentrism and ethnocentrism carry a danger of reducing the encounter with the stranger knew something instead of us learn something, learn to withstand a certain degree of understanding of non abroad and non-identity, learn heterological thinking. In the process of intercultural training, there is uncertainty and complexity, difference and transgression, he is living with a growing number of hybrid cultural forms. (shrink)

This article reconstructs a conflict arising in a primary school in an inner-city district of Berlin. A pencil case of a newly enrolled girl with a migration background has been hidden. Is it a mobbing act? The teacher feels affected and reacts aggressively. In a longue monologue she collectively holds to account the children. Through her facial expressions, her gestures, her posture, and the prosody of her voice she communicates her moral point of view and her critique of the children. (...) Emphatically she demands not to exclude but to integrate the girl. The interruption of the lesson indicates the importance of the conflict. To avoid the creation of a scapegoat the situation is taken seriously. Committed to the idea of a parenting instruction the teacher wants to secure recognition and appreciation among the children. The question arises if her strong emotional reaction is the adequate way to avoid the exclusion of the girl. (shrink)

To a great extent, cultural learning is mimetic learning, which is at the center of many processes of education, self-education, and human development. It is directed towards other people, social communities and cultural heritages and ensures that they are kept alive. Mimetic learning is a sensory, body-based form of learning in which images, schemas and movements needed to perform actions are learned. This embodiment is responsible for the lasting effects that play an important role in all social and cultural fields. (...) A mimetic process creates both similarities and differences to the situations or persons to which or whom they relate. By participating in the living practices of other people, humans expand their own life-worlds and create for themselves new ways of experiencing and acting. Receptivity and activity overlap. In all areas of human existence rituals and gestures are important for the mimetic development of body knowledge. Embodied knowledge is indispensable in religion, politics, economy, science, families, and education. It helps us to deal with difference and alterity and to create a sense of community and social relationships. It also enables us to assign meaning and structure to human relations. Ritual knowledge facilitates both continuity and change, as well as experiences of transition and transcendence. (shrink)