Untold Ethiopian histories: Finding and filling vexing gaps in the academic record
24. August 2015
Panel at the 19th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies “Ethiopia - Diversity and Interconnections through Space and Time”
Chaired by Dr. des. Verena Krebs (Jerusalem) and Dr. Felix Girke (Konstanz)
This panel focuses on something nonexistent: ‘untold’ episodes in Ethiopian historiography and Ethiopian Studies. While certain great narratives about Ethiopia are by now shared by everybody in the field, much tacit disciplinary knowledge that has never been written down in any accessible or even citable form is also shared among practitioners. Moreover, in this age of interdisciplinarity, many research projects are based on the coordinated cooperation of scholars from different disciplines, enabling new approaches towards Ethiopian Studies. This is an important step in area studies, and obviates many problems of earlier approaches. It also casts our own limits as researchers into stark relief, whether we be archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, philologists, sociologists or art historians. A complex conceptual area such as “Ethiopia” presents us with much that is out-of-place, much that has traveled and is not easily understood from a merely ‘mono-disciplinary’ perspective.
This panel invites researchers from any discipline working on Ethiopia to point out gaps in the academic record they wish would be (or would already long have been) filled by members of other disciplines, with their different methods and instrumentarium. It is also intended as a laboratory of ideas in which vexing gaps in the record, the lacuna of knowledge in the field that somebody else (maybe!) could fill, should be dragged out into the open. By probing the boundaries between disciplines and the limits they impose on their practitioners, new hypotheses and new cooperations might emerge.
Presenters are thus invited to report how their specific work ran up against a lack of knowledge or understanding they themselves felt unable to overcome. Ideally, this panel will provide inspiration for future research, giving hints, suggesting topics, and tracing potential connections benefiting the field as a whole.
24–28 August, 2015
University of Warsaw
Contact
Dr. Felix Girke felix.girke[at]uni-konstanz.de
This panel is being supported by the Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” at the University of Konstanz.
- Links:
- further information: www.ices19.uw.edu.pl/index.php/panelspapers/902