Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective.

从全球视角来看，另类理性和深奥的做法预测和操纵偶发生活事件的做法在全球范围内普遍存在，并证明了尽管有关于科学和技术的强有力的论述，但这种做法具有惊人的韧性。根据对深奥实践的启发式工作定义，该项目的目标是(1)从全球和跨文化的角度绘制这类实践领域的地图，(2)系统地比较从业者及其解释、合理化和合法化战略，以及(3)开发一种解释模型，说明尽管全球都在大力谈论科学和技术，但这种做法仍然存在。(4)通过开发一种细致入微的二级语言，将改进对这种做法的分类评估和学术分类。最后，(5)该项目与最近关于非本质主义比较研究的可能性和局限性的辩论有关。因此，尽管人文学科的现代研究具有典型的专门化和区域化，但它打算通过Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe的形式，探索评估和绘制如此广泛的研究领域的新途径。该项目以跨文化和当代为重点，结合了文化和社会人类学、宗教研究、该领域研究和文献学、社会学以及政治学的方法。Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe的形式允许将来自不同学科的大量学者聚集在一起，他们在不同的文化和地区背景下从事深奥的实践和从业人员以及与之相关的替代理性的工作，以便收集和比较他们的研究结果--从而产生关于数据、方法和理论水平的分析性见解，这些水平是单独的研究或其单纯的串联所不能产生的。在这方面，Kolleg-ForschungsGruppe打算发展一种关于深奥实践的文化理论，帮助解释深奥实践的韧性、它们在大量实例中的类型学相似性，以及它们--从跨文化角度--非常不同的社会和话语评价。将特别关注这样一个问题，即为什么深奥的做法在某些文化背景下不断遭到排斥，而在其他文化背景下，它们仍然被接受，甚至被制度化。为此，将考虑来自不同领域的理论模型--特别是来自宗教和仪式的认知和社会心理学研究领域的理论模型，但也包括人类学、社会学、哲学和宗教史上的越轨研究领域的理论模型。

Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective Practices for predicting and manipulating contingent life events are globally widespread and attest a striking resilience in spite of powerful discourses of science and technology. Based on a heuristic working definition of esoteric practices, the goal of the project is (1) to map the field of such practices from a global and transcultural perspective, (2) to systematically compare the practitioners, their interpretation, rationalisation and legitimisation strategies, and (3) to develop an explanatory model for the persistence of such practices in spite of globally powerful discourses of science and technology. (4) Through developing a nuanced second-order language, the taxonomical assessment and scholarly classification of such practices will be improved. Finally, (5) the project ties on recent debates on the possibilities and limits of non-essentialist comparative research. It thus intends – through the format of the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe – to explore new avenues for assessing and mapping such a broad research field despite the typical specialisation and regionalisation of modern research in the humanities. The project has a transcultural and contemporary focus and combines methods from cultural and social anthropology, religious studies, the area studies and philology, sociology as well as political science. The format of Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe allows for bringing together a large number of scholars from different disciplines, who work on esoteric practices and practitioners and the alternative rationalities associated therewith in different cultural and regional contexts, in order to gather and compare their research findings – thereby generating analytical insights on the level of the level of data, method and theory that cannot be produced by individual studies or their mere concatenation. In this regard, the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe intends to develop a cultural theory of esoteric practices that helps to explain the resilience of esoteric practices, their typological similarities across a large number of examples, as well as their – from an intercultural perspective – very different social and discursive evaluations. Special attention will be given to the question of why esoteric practices are continuously ostracised in certain cultural settings, whereas they remain accepted or even institutionalised in others. To that end, theoretical models from different domains will be taken into account – especially from the realm of the cognitive and social-psychological study of religion and ritual, but also from the fields of anthropology, sociology, philosophy and deviance studies in the history of religion.