Analogies between Comparisons as Mechanisms of “Departicularization”? On the Construction of Resonances between Colonial and Metropolitan Formations of Comparisons in National “Founding Debates” in the German Empire (1871-1918). (F07#)

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The project investigates social-scientific and missionary communities of practice in the German Empire that constructed analogies 1) between the “social question” in the metropole (and metropolitan comparisons of “bourgeois” vs. “workers”) and the “native question” in the colonies (and colonial comparisons of “Germans” and “natives”); and 2) between the “Kulturkampf” in the metropole (and metropolitan comparisons between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism”) and the religious situation in the colonies (and colonial comparisons between “European Christendom” and “Islam”). Building on Bourdieu’s theory of state-formation, the project hypothesizes that the confounding of these comparisons “departicularized” a bourgeois ideal of the good life and a Protestant norm of religious subjectivity as both became conflated with Germanness as such via contrasts to a “colonial other.”