Cette session se propose deux objectifs. D’une part, il s’agit de rendre compte à la communauté internationale des historiens d’un projet qui est lui aussi, par essence, international : mobiliser des chercheurs de différents continents sur l’étude d’une institution supranationale contemporaine. D’autre part, pour mener à bien un tel projet, trois grands colloques se seront tenus entre avril 2009 et mars 2010 à Cambridge, Dakar et Heidelberg et il s’agira donc aussi de tirer les premiers enseignements, méthodologiques et épistémologiques, de cette grande recherche collective en cours.

At various times in history, when crises have threatened the power structures and social order of communities throughout the world, symbolic representations of women have been produced as a means to reshape and strengthen these communities. Among the more important threats we can count wars and revolutions, natural disasters, pandemics, and economic recessions. This is still the case today. This past March, the French government’s decision to portray Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, as a pregnant woman, in order to promote the sale of large amounts of government bonds, made headlines throughout the world. As a background to this decision, there are France’s decreasing birthrate, a deep economic crisis, and an uncertain future. The image of woman as a symbol of the republic was used here to mobilize the hopes of the population. In the face of criticism by feminists, the officials responsible for this government campaign responded that motherhood was something beautiful and that hence it was “natural” for them to use it to create an image of the future.
Indeed, images of beautiful and young women carrying the attributes of motherhood have been used in many historical moments and in many different geographic areas. Yet when we observe this phenomenon closely, it becomes clear that in times of crisis these were not the only types of images produced. There are various symbolic representations of women that were in a beginning related to women in legends and myths, in stories, or that had a role in religious leadership, and had been given divine status and had later become objects of devotion.
On the other hand, there were other periods and societies where images of women associated to death and destruction, or to decadent or transient desires, circulated widely. Such representations of women do not exist in a vacuum. They emerged within particular societies and historical moments, and were intimately related to the circumstances of the women that lived in them. However, often these images of famous or anonymous women and their lives and experiences, were concocted into symbolic images of womanhood, circulated and exploited by the male elite in control of the hegemony.
In this panel, we will examine the production and circulation of images of women, relating them to the individual and concrete historical contexts where they emerged. We will pay special attention to the meaning and function of these images as they emerge in contexts throughout the world. By comparing these cases, we will frame the way in which gender operated as a mechanism for the perpetuation of social and political order and examine the process through which gender was transformed, concurrent with the dissolution or reformation of power structures. We will focus on polemics and schisms concerning representations of women, along images of women produced by counter-hegemonic forces, or even women themselves. We will stress the fact that gender could be transformed within particular historical contexts. Ultimately, the aim of this panel is discussing these images not as mere relics from the past, but as they relate to representations of women that are still being globally produced and debated today, and examine their place in the communities we imagine and seek to create for the future.

How did inequality around the globe develop in the long run? How can we measure various aspects of inequality? This session firstly draws together new evidence on income inequality, especially in today’s developing and emerging market countries and world regions, such as Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It secondly aims at comparing classical income inequality concepts with other approaches of measuring inequality, such as height inequality, human capital inequality, and the systematic comparison of real wage per GDP/p with gini coefficients of income inequality. Third, and on the basis of these new evidence and concepts, the session aims to promote the analysis of global inequality trends. Doing this, a fascinating new picture of global divergence and convergence movements is drawn.

This session focuses on the phenomenon of cross-cultural migration and its effect on both migrants and receiving societies, especially with respect to identity and network formation. On the one hand papers deal with migrants who are so powerful that they can to some extent determine the terms of interaction (Spanish in Mexico and Peru in the early modern period and Americans in Mexico more recently). On the other hand papers discuss more conventional settlement models in which newcomers have to adapt to the institutional settings, rules and values of the receiving society, and who sometimes are confronted with hostility (Jews in Shanghai, Germans in Australia, Berbers in Europe, migrants in Italy and Ireland). How these processes evolve in the long run not only depends on power relations. It is also determined by the mix of human capital and the form of the migration project when it comes to the migrants, and pertaining to the countries of settlement the official and popular reactions to specific groups as part of the wider opportunity structure. In the session a principal distinction will be made between the settlement process in the short and long (intergenerational ) run, with as key question to what extent over time identities and networks (ascribed and self constructed) emerge, change and disappear. This question will be linked to more general historical integration models.

In the course of the 20th century social theorists suggested that food and clothing are crucial for the way people see (and judge) people (including themselves). By the year 2000 most psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians would not question the relevance of clothing and food in the formation of identity and the forging of communities (whether small, as the family, medium, as the community, or large, as the nation). This significance appears through notorious present-day examples such as the wearing of a shawl, the use of very stylish dress, the refusal of eating meat, and the consumption of snails (or horsemeat, insects, frogs…). Crucial is the knowledge that both food and clothing go beyond “simple” distinctions of class, region, gender, ethnicity or age. Within a group, food and clothing do indeed permit to mark and observe subtle differences, often hidden in details and behind self-evident conduct. Without doubt, subtle and crude differences with regard to food and clothing appear in all times and places. These differences have been a means to express wealth, status, relationships, and attachments, as well as they were (are) a possibility to emphasize political, social and cultural rivalry and distinctiveness. “We” and “they” are constructed via food and clothes.
Yet, the actual role of food and clothing in expressing meaning is far from straightforward and simple. People may change clothes easily, or they may eat occasionally very unfamiliar foodstuffs. Also and crucial, food and clothes may be used to trespass boundaries. Moreover, other characteristics, such as religion, origin or language, may also be part of identity formation.
Questions that come to mind are manifold. Food and clothing come about in unconscious ways that are part of everyday life: when and how did these appear? Do they change, and how and why? What is the precise role of food and clothing in identity construction? Are these central, rather stable elements, or would they be flexible? Who sets the rules? And what about conscious forging of identity via food and clothing: when and why does this occur? Feasts contribute highly to identity construction, and in most communities, feasts come along with special clothing (or at least festive garments) and special food and drink, but which kind of clothing and food? Theories and hypotheses may come to mind. Elites are often seen as innovators, adopting new ways of clothing and eating. These initiate (social and cultural) borders with codes, rules and behaviour. Often, the elite’s ways are copied or, at least, interpreted and adapted. Is this trickling down the only way of diffusion of (new) food and clothing, or would influence of “the street” play a role?
Six historians tackle these issues by considering elements of the food and the clothing chain, which implies attention to production, trade, retailing, consumption and significance of food and clothing in very diverse times and places. They do not do so hoping to achieve an overall conclusion, but mainly to explore a relatively new topic in historical research.

The work of the United Nations (UN) in the area of human rights can influence both the topics on which historians work and the concepts they use. As human rights encompass virtually all spheres of life, large parts of the historical production inevitably deal with aspects of human rights or their abuses. This Specialized Theme, however, intends to focus strictly on human rights concepts, as developed within the UN, which are of particular importance for historians. Three areas in particular need further clarification. First, the international human rights regime creates obligations as well as opportunities for our profession. Second, there is a tension between legal and historical-analytical uses of human rights concepts. Third, human rights campaigns have traditionally focused on contemporary issues, whereas historians typically view human rights in a longer perspective. It is proposed to study these areas along the following lines.
Ethics. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, privacy and reputation and freedom of expression and information merit high protection levels. This has important bearings on historians’ ethics: What duties for historians follow from the privacy and reputation of their subjects of study? How can considerations of privacy and reputation be balanced against the principle that those engaged in public life should be accountable for their actions? Are there limits to historians’ rights to free expression and information?
Impunity and reparation. In the wake of discussions about how societies emerging from periods marked by major conflict and crimes implement justice, two concepts have received major attention: the impunity of perpetrators of human rights abuses and the reparation for the harm done to their victims. The debate centers on the duties of states to investigate, prosecute, and commemorate major crimes. As a complement to these duties, the UN have advocated a so-called “right to the truth” (formerly labeled a “right to know”) for victims. Further aspects are reparations for victims, legal forms of forgetting, the value of archives of former repressive regimes, and the function of truth commissions acting as protohistorians.
Historical injustice. This brings us to another class of concepts—those with longer-term time dimensions. The question is whether the 1985 UN definition of victim extends beyond “the immediate family or dependants” to include victims of historical injustices of longer ago. Are slavery, colonization, apartheid, and the pillage of the world’s cultural heritage problems for which accountability can be determined?
Dead persons. In 2002, the International Criminal Court, not a part of the UN but very close to it, developed a new concept: outrages upon the dignity of dead persons. How should historians deal with this concept?
Retroactive moral judgments. The UN General Assembly and other venues have retroactively given labels to some historical phenomena which may influence the historians’ moral judgments about them. For example, the Holocaust was called a genocide from 1948, and apartheid a crime against humanity from 1973. Obviously, giving those events such labels changes their moral status and increases the pressure on the historians’ efforts at interpretation. What effects upon historical writing, then, had (and will have) these labels?

Are cities during the 20th century only the arena of violent conflicts engendered elsewhere in societies or are violent encounters a consequence of urban development towards the global mega-cities and their spatial segregations? Beside this central question the Round Table is also interested in the effects violent acts may have on the urban development and in the importance urban spaces may have inside the strategies and goals of violent acting groups. The conveners will discuss questions of social and ethnic division and segregration, gender discrimination and criminalization in different parts of the world and ask whether they provoke violent reactions. But they will not neglect the dynamics of violence, the relation between repression and violent responses and the specificity of different forms of violence

Ranging over the subject of sometimes intersecting Sanskritic to Islamic cosmopolitanisms, this panel takes a somewhat elastic definition of the premodern and offers five different historical perspectives on the religio-cultural continuities linking South and Southeast Asia. In the process we shall question the directionalities and varieties of mobilities engendered by the transmission and reception of religious practices. The first paper, by Arlo Griffiths, offers a survey of the array of the pre-Islamic inscriptions in Northern Sumatra in Old Malay, Sanskrit, Tamil and Old Javanese, though all may be connected to the primacy of Buddhism in the pre-modern arena. Helen Creese will then present an examination of the transmission and reception of Sanskritic religious culture in insular Southeast Asia with special reference to Java and Bali; asking whether the vernacularization of this culture parallelled the processes in India described by Pollock. Rila Mukherjee then offers perspectives on trade in the eastern basin of the Indian Ocean as a continuum leading into the South China Sea, focussing on the use of the Godess cum saint as a symbol of maritime expansion throughout what Bin Yang termed the Southern Silk Route. The last two papers will then turn to Islamic trends in the Indian Ocean arena. The first, by Elizabeth Lambourn, will examine the question of Muslin autonomy and minority status in that arena, seeking evidence for what she calls “the processes of translation” that they underwent on the Oceanic fringes of the Dar al-Islam. Lastly, Ronit Ricci will examine the notion of the Arabicized cosmopolis from the sixteenth century, focusing on the literary production of Muslims of Southeast Asian descent living in Sri Lanka, which brings our panel back in upon itself in many ways, with European interventions effectively transplanting the Islam of Southeast Asia back on but one of the routes that brought it to the archipelago. Bhavani Raman will then offer comments.