Keynote lecture by Carmen Meinert at conference in Vienna
Carmen Meinert from CERES gave a keynote lecture at the conference “Language and Culture in the Borderlands of the Eastern Silk Road”, which took place from September 4 to 9, 2024. As part of the conference, which was organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Cluster of Excellence “EurAsian Transformations” as well as other scientific actors, Meinert, who is herself a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cluster of Excellence, gave a comprehensive presentation of the BuddhistRoad project she is leading and its research results.
As Meinert explained in her lecture “The Buddhicisation of Eastern Central Asia under the Rule of Central Asian People”, the project, which was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), investigated how Buddhist centers in Eastern Central Asia promoted significant intercultural exchange processes between the 6th and 14th centuries. With its work between 2017 and 2024, the BuddhistRoad team was able to show that localizations of Buddhism developed in eastern Central Asia under the rule of Central Asian peoples - starting with the Tibetans in the 8th century up to the Tanguts in the 11th-13th centuries - whose significance continued to have an impact as far as Tibet and China.
Buddhism served as a unifying element that held together multicultural societies consisting of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tanguts, Khotanese and Chinese. Strategies such as legitimization, patronage and donations played a central role in transcultural exchange and in this transformation, as Carmen Meinert also noted in her lecture.
In view of the research findings, Meinert argued in her presentation, that Eastern Central Asia at that time should be understood as a widely ramified cultural unit from the perspective of network research, thereby overcoming artificially created disciplinary boundaries such as Turfan or Dunhuang studies.
The aim of the conference, which took place on the premises of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, was to develop new research perspectives through interdisciplinary cooperation between fields such as linguistics, philology, history and digital humanities and to promote innovative methodological approaches to researching the civilizations of the ancient Silk Road.
Floriana Marra (on the right in the photo) also took part in the conference with her presentation “Interreligious Encounter in Sogdian Manichaean Texts: The Case of M549+M1760.”. Marra had previously taken part in a two-week summer school organized by the Cluster of Excellence.