Projet ANR-18-ERC1-0003 LUBARTWORLD
Migration and Holocaust: Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s) (2019-2024)
Porteur : Claire Zalc (CNRS-EHESS, Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine (IHMC))
Publications du projet disponibles sur HAL
Migrations are a central issue of the modern period, particularly since World War One. At the same time, the implementation of a systematic policy of categorization, discrimination, persecution, and extermination of European Jews is one of the major events of the first half of the 20th century. How should the relations between these two histories be understood? The goal of this project is to explore the links between migration and the Holocaust from a transnational microhistorical perspective. To this end, it will implement an original method: producing the collective biography of the Jewish inhabitants from the Polish shtetl of Lubartow from the 1920s to the 1950s, whether they emigrated or stayed behind, whether they were exterminated or survived the Holocaust. This research will, for the first time, reconstruct the trajectories of a group of persecution victims across the different places they travelled through, which is possible today thanks to new access to an impressive body of archives and the affordances of the digital humanities. The methodological and archival challenge is immense. This transnational collective biography explores the directions of individual journeys, the diversity of fates, as well as the connections between those who remained and those who left. By doing so, the LUBARTWORLD project addresses some prominent theoretical issues: the dynamics of a social structure drawn into a major disruption, the variability of social categorizations in diverse national and political contexts, and the complex making of identities. From an epistemological point of view, it will develop innovative ways of reconstructing and analyzing life-course information. Although the project begins with Lubartow, it leads to the world in its globality. Lubartow residents crisscrossed the globe, and their trajectories outline and embody in their own way the upheavals of Europe’s relations with the world before, during, and after the Holocaust.
Projet ERC ETRAHNET
Energy Transitions in the History of Economic Thought (19th-20th c.) (2022-2027)
Porteur : Antoine Missemer (CNRS, Cired, UMR 8568)
Economic ideas play a vital role in public decision-making. The energy sector is an emblematic case: competition policies (e.g. anti-trust laws, deregulation), taxation, emission permits and sustainable-growth programmes all have origins rooted in economic reasoning. Today, more than 80% of the world’s primary energy comes from fossil fuel combustion, contributing strongly (75% of CO2 emissions) to climate change. To understand the historical developments that led to this situation, an in-depth examination of past economic discourses, concepts, theories, models and policy recommendations is essential. This has not been done to date. ETRANHET’s ambition is thus to write the first ever history of energy transitions in economic thought, on a global scale. ETRANHET will analyse how economics has dealt with energy issues and transitions since the early 19th century, in diverse market-economy contexts (5 areas: Continental Western Europe, the British Isles, North America, Latin America, Japan). Deliberately going beyond the English-speaking literature, it will perform an unusual decentring of the history of economic thought. ETRANHET aims to characterise the context-dependency of past economic views of energy. It seeks to uncover forgotten, yet relevant, ideas that could enrich current research into the energy transition. And it intends to precisely determine how the economic discipline has been able to influence decision-making in energy matters. ETRANHET is a multidisciplinary project mobilising historiographical and science studies methods to study past economists and economic thinking. Digital humanities and archival research will be key, including the creation of electronic repositories, making new valuable material available to historians. By taking a fresh look at today’s challenges in relation to the low-carbon transition, ETRANHET will contribute to show that the history of ideas has a role to play in contemporary debates on sustainability.
Projet ERC N°809994 DHARMA
The Domestication of ‘Hindu’ Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and Southeast Asia (2019-2025)
Porteurs : Griffiths Arlo, Schmiedchen Annette, FRANCIS Emmanuel
Publications du projet disponibles sur HAL
Censuses report over a billion “Hindus” in the world today. But what is “Hinduism”? In answer, many accounts describe the doctrinal evolutions of various quite different currents of thought. To try to reply using material and social evidence is difficult because so many vital primary sources for institutional history remain inaccessible. What were the material foundations of the constellation of religious movements today classed as “Hindu”? How have different forms of religious agency shaped the institutional and religious landscape of a large sweep of Asia? How did such “Hindu” traditions, associated primarily with the ideas and practices of ascetics questing for liberation, become institutionally rooted? And what were the repercussions of the widespread patronage of pious foundations? Three types of sources will be examined: inscriptions, manuscripts, archaeological remains. Inscriptions are crucial because most of our historical knowledge of early South and Southeast Asia is based on epigraphy. We will explore, mine and diffuse these sources with the tools of digital humanities (rich mark-up of proper-names, technical terms, geodata, etc.). In order to contextualise epigraphy, unpublished prescriptive texts and new archaeological data will be adduced. Our goal is to identify and to map regional and interregional patterns of patronage. The actors are varied: “lettrés”, holy men and priestly intermediaries, as well as their patrons, often grandees of the state; but also cenobitic communities with their statutes, their libraries, their educational activities, and their incipient bureaucracy. Through a comparative approach (concentrating on “Hinduism”, but also considering the so-called “heretic” religions Buddhism and Jainism), and in a broad range of regional contexts, we shall attempt to uncover with unprecedented historical depth the complex interplay of religion, state and society in a formative period, the “Śaiva Age”, between the 6th and 13th centuries.
