Project

Europe and America in contact: a multidisciplinary study of
cross-cultural ...

Project acronym CULTURECONTACT

Researcher (PI)

Justyna Agnieszka Olko-Bajer

Host institution
(HI)

UNIWERSYTET WARSZAWSKI, POLSKA

Call details

ERC-2012-StG, SH6

Summary

At the core of this research proposal is the aim of
reconstructing and understanding the nature, exact
trajectories, mechanisms and implications of cross-cultural
contact and transfers between Europeans and the native
people of the Americas, focusing on, but not limited to, the
Nahuatl-speaking zone of central Mexico. A major innovation of
this project is to study this process of cross-cultural
communication in its full historical depth, through the colonial
and postcolonial eras up to the present day and encompassing
different stages and types of contact. The meticulous and
cross-disciplinary study of an extensive body of texts in Nahuatl
(Aztec) and Spanish, complemented by present-day
ethnolinguistic data, will make it possible to deduce and
understand patterns across time and space in ways novel to
existing scholarship, embracing both micro- and macroregional
trends.
The proposed research starts with identifying transfers in
language, studied systematically through the creation of
extensive databases, but leads to exploring the substance of
cross-cultural transfer and the essence of developments,
becoming a fundamental way of studying culture and its
transformations. Thus, an important aim is the correlation of
language phenomena with more general contact-induced
culture change, including especially evolving forms of political,
social and municipal organization in the native world, where the
change is more salient. Breaking existing disciplinary boundaries
in the humanities, the project embraces both indigenous and
European perspectives, assuming that the innovation of
studying both sides in a single framework and in the proposed
time span is particularly promising in dealing with a notably two-
sided, prolonged historical process. The complementary lines of
research, native and Spanish, are expected to highlight and
make understandable factors underlying and facilitating cultural
convergence between them in different aspects of colonial life
and beyond.

Website (HI)

http://www.uw.edu.pl

Max ERC funding 1.32 million Euros

Duration

60 months

Source URL:

http://erc.europa.eu/cordis_search/project_details/105965

Published on

ERC: European Research Council

(

http://erc.europa.eu

)

Europe and America in contact: a

multidisciplinary study of cross-cultural transfer

in the New World across time

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Source URL:

http://erc.europa.eu/cordis_search/project_details/105965

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