Peter A. Mark Professor emeritus of Art History, Wesleyan University Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: April 2024, Mai/June 2025, April/Mai 2026, September 2026 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Local Ethics: Hospitality and Assimilation on the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa)«? Project outline: Inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s call for »une anthropologie philosophique« (see conversation with Joël Roman and Étienne Tassin »J’attends la Renaissance«) I offer this methodologically hybrid investigation. An historical ethnography of southern Senegal provides the foundation for reflections on the intimate connections between hospitality, identity, and a local Senegambian ethics of humanity. Senegambian society is defined by the central importance of hospitality. In addition, individuals could hold multiple, contextually determined identities; furthermore, in pre-colonial society and before the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, skin color was not a parameter of identity. Together, these factors facilitated the incorporation of foreigners into local communities, in sharp contrast to the contemporary situation in Europe or in North America since January 2025. (Peter A. Mark) Research partner: Peter Mark is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg at the invitation of Roland Hardenberg, Director of the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropological at Goethe University. In 2024, he worked on »The earliest West African responses to the Atlantic slave trade«; the stay was funded by the Frobenius Institute. Since 2025, he has been collaborating with researchers from the »Religion and De:Toxification (RelTox)« research group. Scholarly profile of Peter A. MarkPeter Mark is Professor emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University. He has worked regularly at the Frobenius Institute since 1984, both as Alexander-von-Humboldt-Fellow, and as Visiting Faculty Member. From 2015 to 2019 he was Invited Cathedratic Professor of History, at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris, 2019) and at the Max-Planck-Institut (Halle, 2018). In 2012-2013 he was Senior Fellow at the research center »Re:work, Arbeit und Lebenslauf in globalhistorischer Perspektive« at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Website: Please find more information about Peter Mark here. Main areas of research: Cultural history of West Africa: pre-colonial history, art history, and 16th through 19th century European-African interaction, forms of captivity and unfree labor before the expansion of the Atlantic slave tradeSelected publications:
|