ENCOUNTERS, ETHNOGRAPHIES and
EMPIRES
The UIC Department
of History is pleased to invite applications for its new Ph.D. concentration,
“Encounters, Ethnographies, and Empires.” ENCOUNTERS
draws upon the expertise of faculty with regional specializations
in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States. The
concentration offers students specializing in any one of these areas
the opportunity for comparative study and research on topics related
to encounters between different peoples, cultures, and continents.
Faculty participating in the concentration share common interests
in how empires from Rome to the imperial nation-states of the twentieth
century proclaimed the transformative power of universals such as
religion, civilization, or democracy. At the same time empires produced
ethnographies of difference, revealing and concealing more complex
cultural transformations that affected both colonizers and the colonized.
Course work will provide students working in different regions of
the world a firm grounding in a common literature as well as a forum
for lively intellectual debate.
ENCOUNTERS
 Encounters
between different peoples, cultures, and continents took many forms
and played a formative role in world history. They occurred as a
result of invasions and conquest, when new commercial connections
were formed, or as part of a larger history of migration. Encounters
between indigenous peoples and expanding empires often became wars
of conquest, or led to conflicts between colonists and native peoples
over land and resources, but they also frequently led to intermarriage,
the development of trade, the exchange of diseases, plants, and
animals, the reshaping of sacred cosmologies, and ultimately to
the emergence of new languages, ways of life, and religions. Encounters
could lead to devastating epidemics and brutal wars of conquest,
but encounters were also dialogues with multiple participants, where
exchanges of goods and services and translation and negotiation
were paramount. Encounters created specialists and brokers who dealt
with merchants and sailors, especially in world wide networks of
maritime commerce.
ETHNOGRAPHIES
 Empires
as diverse as Rome, China, or Russia produced ethnographies as they
catalogued and classified the “barbarians” and “primitives”
on their frontiers. Describing the “other” was central
to defining the imperial self. When Muslim and Christian scholars
wrote ethnographies they added new concerns with classifying infidel
followers of false religions and pagan idolaters deemed to have
no religion at all. The encounters between cultures and continents
after 1400 produced a profusion of new ethnographies, long before
ethnography became a field of study and research. By the mid-nineteenth
century professional ethnographers were mapping the imperial nation
from within and without, comparing women, children, and minorities
to “primitives” and cataloguing subject peoples abroad.
Ethnography still shapes thinking about the clash of civilizations.
Ethnography is also a powerful tool for the recovery of the hidden
transcripts of peoples without history, the oral traditions and
indigenous faiths of decentralized and small scale societies too
often seen simply as victims of history. The cacophonous dialogue
of ethnographies from above and below is crucial to understanding
the myriad new cultural forms that emerge from the history of encounters.
EMPIRES
 Empires
played a crucial role in the history of encounters and ethnographies
and in the creation and propagation of new cultural identities.
Long vanished empires have left their cultural footprint on much
of the world, as Rome did in Europe and as Islamic Caliphates did
in territories across North Africa and much of Asia. Dynastic Empires
that survived into the modern era, as in Russia, the Ottoman Empire
or China, shaped the cultural identity of much of Eurasia. European
overseas empires, in a first wave of expansion, gave birth to new
societies in the Americas, tapestries woven with threads of American,
European, and African origins, and in a second wave, colonized Africa
and much of Asia. Imperial rule was never uniform and was always
contested, but Empires ruled over most of humanity until the middle
decades of the 20th century. Their imprints and legacies are still
with us today.
Application/Information about the
Encounters Graduate Concentration
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