Fernand Braudel Center

Research Working Group on Cultural Forms in the Modern World-System

The Fernand Braudel Center is instituting a new research working group entitled “Cultural Forms in the Modern World-System”. It will be concerned with the question of particular articulations of material practices, symbolic systems, and discursive forms widely construed, in the medium term, that have contributed to the reproduction of (or resistance to) the long-term structures of the modern world-system. Areas of interest might include literary production, music, film, painting, architecture, etc.

This group will build on those past projects of the Center that have focused on the relationship between the processes of the socio-cultural arena of social analysis and the political and economic processes of the modern world-system. Specifically, this long-term research agenda, manifested in a series of publications over the past few years, has been concerned with the three arenas as co-constitutive of the modern world from at least the sixteenth century. It was the argument of The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the Modern World-System (1996) that the processes reproducing the structures in each of the three arenas are at present in crisis. With particular reference to the structures of knowledge, the Fernand Braudel Center acted as Secretariat of the Gulbenkian Commission whose project reached fruition with the publication of Open the Social Sciences (1996). The follow-up project that examined the development of the long-term structures of knowledge and the specific contemporary challenges to them is being published as Overcoming the Two Cultures: The Sciences versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System (2004). Another group, now finalizing its manuscript, has been concerned with the way the structures of knowledge were exported to and institutionalized in the periphery as negotiated and differentiated mechanisms in the expansion of the modern world-system.

Cultural Forms in the Modern World-System RWG will be coordinated by Richard E. Lee and will have its organizational meeting at the Fernand Braudel Center, Academic A 330, Thursday, Sept. 14, 2006 at 4:30 pm. Participants from all disciplines are welcome.

Discussion notes for members only

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