31.1290, Calls: Hist Ling/Belgium

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-1290. Tue Apr 07 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.1290, Calls: Hist Ling/Belgium

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Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2020 21:15:49
From: Birgit Ricquier [birgit.ricquier at ulb.ac.be]
Subject: ''Extracting the Past from the Present'': International and Interdisciplinary Conference on African Precolonial History

 
Full Title: "Extracting the Past from the Present": International and Interdisciplinary Conference on African Precolonial History 
Short Title: IICAPH2021 

Date: 01-Mar-2021 - 05-Mar-2021
Location: Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium 
Contact Person: Birgit Ricquier
Meeting Email: info at banturivers.eu
Web Site: https://banturivers.eu/extracting-the-past-from-the-present-international-and-interdisciplinary-conference-on-african-precolonial-history-march-1st-5th-2021-ulb/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Jun-2020 

Meeting Description:

The conference will gather scholars who study African precolonial history from
different disciplines, methodologies and datasets. A prominent role is indeed
played by historical linguistics: through language classification, the study
of linguistic contact phenomena, the reconstruction of ancient vocabulary,
etc. We therefore like to encourage linguists to take part in this
interdisciplinary gathering which forms a unique opportunity to discuss the
relevance of linguistic results for historical research, i.e. the African
precolonial past.

The central theme of the conference is ''Extracting the Past from the
Present''. Many of us analyze data that have been collected recently – words
and phrases, observations of contemporary pottery techniques, genes, etc. – in
order to formulate hypotheses on the past. Hardliners argue that only direct
evidence – such as ancients objects – may inform us on the past and that such
inferences are mere speculation. Yet, many of the insights we value today are
based on contemporary evidence, for instance the theories on the Bantu
Expansion. The use of contemporary data is also at the core of our own ERC
research project, BANTURIVERS, with anthropology receiving its proper role
within historical research. At the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Royal
Museum for Central Africa, we map contemporary evidence (pottery traditions,
words) in space before travelling into time. For this, we are looking into the
possibilities of cartography and the spatial approach as a common language to
speak of history across the various disciplines. This is the direct incentive
for the focus of our conference on the use of contemporary evidence as a frame
for decoding the past. Given its controversial nature, we also welcome
critical approaches.

The conference will take place from March 1-5, 2021, at the premises of the
Université libre de Bruxelles. We foresee five days of conference because we
want to avoid parallel sessions and instead foster the exchange between
scholars working at opposite sides of the continent, on different epochs and
diverging research interests, but all facing the same multidisciplinary
challenge.


Call for Papers: 

Please send an abstract of no more than one page, including all authors and
references, to info at banturivers.eu no later than June 30, 2020. All accepted
papers should result in a 20-minute oral presentation at the conference.

You may submit abstracts individually. However, if you would like a panel on a
particular topic, related to or other than the central theme of the
conference, you may invite colleagues for a session of 4 to 6 presentations.
In this case, we ask the organizer of the panel to send us the individual
abstracts together with a brief introduction to the panel (again no more than
one page) in one e-mail, not separately. In this case, the abstracts of the
same panel will be reviewed together.

We encourage participation from scholars based in Africa and we invite these
colleagues to mention in their reply if they wish financial support for
travelling.




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