Comparative Approaches to Visions of Community

Abstract

The aims of the first VISCOM conference were to compare different methods employed in the study of community to address new methodological perspectives for the analysis of categories of identification and belonging, the conditions and processes of the making of communities across large cultural and geo-political fields. At the same time, this exchange was meant to provide thorough reflections on the process of comparative research itself. This contribution sets out to discuss the diversity and creative tension of these methodological approaches before proceeding to outline how they may contribute to future collaboration both within the VISCOM project and beyond in interdisciplinary and, eventually, in transdisciplinary collaboration between historians and socio-anthropologists. The text thus focuses on the methodological tools and the very practical research processes addressed at the conference and in the case studies brought together in this thematic issue. It will specifically address the challenge to develop comparable, but contextually differentiated approaches to different types and amounts of medieval source material across time and space, viewing the methodological and conceptual framework of the project and the contributions of this issue as a toolbox. I will thus take up the claims of several contributors to more thoroughly contextualise the very conceptual notions underlying our research (such as identity, ethnicity and community) and argue in favour of a less “loaded” and more flexible conceptual vocabulary developed in close relation with the source material to cope with the high diversity of sources and methodological approaches.

Keywords:

• Community
• Medieval Studies
• Medieval Sources
• Comparative Methodology
• Interdisciplinarity

Notes

1 cf. the editors’ introduction on the background of the “VISCOM” cooperation between the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 2011–2015 through its Special Research Realm (SFB) programme ‘Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire’ [F-42]. Special thanks for important feedback and discussion above all to my co-editor Andre Gingrich, to the other contributors to this thematic collection, to the editors of History and Anthropology, to the VISCOM junior scholars and project part leaders, esp. Oliver Schmitt (Vienna), and to David Westacott (Vienna) for copy editing.

2 Even more, these levels again are mutually interrelated: in her paper on emotional communities, Barbara Rosenwein (2014) drawing on Jan Plamper's research on Russian military psychology around 1900 highlights how ‘scientific emotion talk’ not only rendered emotions a legitimate object of scientific inquiry (cf. Plamper 2009, 260), but also reciprocally made the specific emotions that were talked about, that is above all fear, available to be felt.

3 cf. the editors' introduction. This specific question has been less discussed in medieval studies compared to the comprehensive debates in sociology, led by post-war sociologist R. König. Otto Gerhard Oexle (e.g. 1992 and 1998) is one of the rather few medievalists in the German academy to directly comment on the concept of Gemeinschaft, among others also critically referring to the sociological tradition of F. Tönnies (1957). See also Schneidmüller and Weinfurter (2006, 14). There is abundant scholarship on the complex relations between Nazi ideology and contemporaneous German-speaking representatives of medieval studies: cf. Algazi (1997, 167 and 189).

4 The formulation is borrowed from social historian Burke (2004, 5); compare the perhaps most influential terminology of South East Asia historian Anderson (1983) as well as social-anthropologist Cohen (1985) in his work on more ‘local’ if European communities; on main versions or ‘grammars’ of group identities (see also Baumann and Gingrich 2004).

5 On methodological issues regarding the Dalmatian archival material, see VISCOM's project part P07 Society, Statehood and Religion in Late Medieval Dalmatia, lead by Oliver Schmitt (cf. Schmitt 2011).

6 Important background information is provided by Guntram Hazod (2014). Current project fieldwork is undertaken by Matthias Fermer in his Ph.D. project Sa skya Monastic Communities in Southern Central Tibet during the Phag mo gru pa hegemony (1354–ca. 1480) in the frame of VISCOM's project part P04 The Tibetan Empire and the Formation of Buddhist Civilisation in the Highlands.