Article ID: CBB001551403

Avestan Studies in Imperial Germany: Sciences of Text and Sound (2015)

unapi

This article sheds new light on late-19th-century debates about the organization of knowledge through its emphasis on German orientalism and comparative linguistics. Centering on Friedrich Carl Andreas' (1846--1930) controversial reconstruction of the Avestan language and its sacred literary corpus, I highlight a shift from the history of texts to an engagement with `living' language in the decades around 1900. Andreas is shown to have inherited aspects of two schools, which collectively defined the landscape of 19th-century philological research -- one traditional and the other comparative. The long-standing struggle between these schools demonstrates that `the humanities' were no monolithic foil to the rise of natural sciences during the second half of the 19th century. Instead, I argue that alternative conceptual frameworks were cultivated within German philology -- concepts that were taken up in broader disciplinary debates, though they were not narrowly the products of them.

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Authors & Contributors
Petsche, Hans-Joachim
Brescius, Moritz von
Lindsey J. Brandt
Morgan J. Robinson
Débarre, Ségolène
Willet, Richard
Concepts
Linguistics; philology
Imperialism
Physics
Mathematics
Biographies
Colonialism
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
20th century
18th century
Places
Germany
France
Óman
South Asia
Tanzania (Tanganyika, Zanzibar)
Central Asia
Institutions
East India Company (English)
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