From North Africa to Central Asia various social groups have lived alongside one another for centuries or even millennia, distinguishing themselves by factors such as language, religion, and ethnicity. The 2019 workshop hosted by the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies will address how these communities, social groups, and political bodies represented, perceived, and interacted with one another, as well as how they engaged in self-representation, self-perception, and in-group negotiation.

The workshop’s central question will be, How do these communities see their relationships among themselves and to one another? Some facets of this might include, How do they reveal these perceptions in their texts and collective memories? To what extent do they orient their visions along doctrinal lines, traditional perspectives, or as a pragmatic response to given situations? How do their perceptions change over time? The international workshop will bring together invited guests in the early-career stage with researchers and students from Munich in an environment meant to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange and contact between different scholarly communities.