News
Tuesday 12 October 2021
The Project "Under the Sky of South Asia" Has Turned 10 Years Old
The Interdisciplinary Team and the Project “Under the Sky of South Asia” has turned 10 years old. 10 years have passed since the first conference that was held on the 12th of October, 2011, that changed every second Wednesday and the following Thursday of this autumn month into a “feast of the spirit”.
Irina Glushkova, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies (the Russian Academy of Sciences), initiated ten years ago the creation of an interdisciplinary multimedia project "Under the Sky of South Asia". The motto of the project "Not in General, but in Particular" means shifting away from traditional Indology created in the colonial times. The former Indology explored (and often constructed) India "as a whole", without taking into account the groups specifics, ethnocultural communities, religious trends, states and political processes, all the phenomena that existed and developed on "earth" in the specific geographical and social spaces and among the living people.
Each of the project volumes is associated with one of the modern "twists", new methodologies put forward in the humanities, that made it possible to consider the data usual for historians, anthropologists, political scientists, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and other specialists from a new point of view. The project made it possible to apply to south asian societies those approaches that turned out to be productive for foreign colleagues who study not only the “East”, but also the “West” (as well as the “North” and the “South”).
The project “Under the Sky of South Asia” brings not only new methodologies to Russian Indology (and to the Oriental Studies broadly). The project is being truly interdisciplinary, it helps the Russian scientists to find a worthy place in the world science, to evaluate and to apply creatively (or reject reasonably) the achievements of the foreign colleagues, to clarify for themselves and the Russian-speaking readers, using the example of the South Asia, the data that we have been mentioning for a long time, but have not studied clearly enough - "the general and the specific issues in the historical and cultural development of the Eastern countries."
We have held seven conferences during this time, about 30 seminars and workshops, we have discussed 136 reports and released five volumes with a total volume of 4170 pages. Sometimes it was not easy, but always bewitchingly interesting. We thank grealty everyone who has been with us during these years. The project is alive and doing well.
Портрет и скульптура |
Движение и пространство |
Территория и принадлежность |
Хула и хвала |
Стыд и гордость |