Cultural Mobility

Abstract

Cultural Mobility is a blueprint and a model for understanding the patterns of meaning that human societies create. Drawn from a wide range of disciplines, the essays collected here under the distinguished editorial guidance of Stephen Greenblatt share the conviction that cultures, even traditional cultures, are rarely stable or fixed. Radical mobility is not a phenomenon of the twenty-first century alone, but is a key constituent element of human life in virtually all periods. Yet academic accounts of culture tend to operate on exactly the opposite assumption and to celebrate what they imagine to be rooted or whole or undamaged. To grasp the shaping power of colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unexpected, random events, along with the fierce compulsions of greed, longing, and restlessness, cultural analysis needs to operate with a new set of principles. An international group of authors spells out these principles and puts them into practice.

Introduction: Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World

“…Our fi ndings support Stephen Greenblatt's suggestion that cultural mobility is best approached through 'detailed, intellectually vital engagements with specifi c cases' rather than 'new grand narratives'. 23 However, bringing the individual studies together creates suggestive resonances among them, shedding light on specifi cities as well as generalities, continuities and also differences, across multiple cultural, temporal, and geographical registers. If individual objects are rich and complex on their own, gathering them together and studying them in relation to one another -as viewers did in early modern cabinets of curiosities -ultimately adds up to more than the sum of its parts.…”

Twisted Trajectories and Jewish-Muslim Interfaces: Bukharan Jews of Central Asia in Vienna

“…Dealing with these issues methodologically, I discuss the case study of the Bukharan diaspora in Vienna, Austria-the site of the most prominent Bukharan community in Europe, numbering around 2,500 people 5 -and consider elements of their 'migration infrastructure' (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) and 'cultural mobility' (Greenblatt 2009). The former implies a combination of various institutions, practices, actors and broader societal transformations that enable migration.…”