Symposium—Antiquarianism in the Islamic World (Edhem Eldem)

Edhem Eldem
Boğaziçi University, Istanbul; Collège de France, Paris
"Contextualizing Art and Artifacts in Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century"

Sponsored by the Trehan Research Fund for Islamic Art and Material Culture

“Antiquarianism” is the term of art used to describe the investigation of the European past through its material remains before art history and archaeology emerged in the nineteenth century as the disciplines devoted to its study. In the period between 1300 and 1800 the encounter with ruins in Northern Europe, North Africa, Greece, and the Levant led to the development of new notions of evidence, new technologies of historical argumentation, new forms of literary exposition, and new standards of proof. While history from texts remained powerful, for a few centuries its hegemony was challenged.

The history of antiquarianism in Europe has been the subject of a burst of new work in the past decades. This coincides with the importance attached more generally to “materiality” and the study of material culture. But there has also been a completely new effort to explore this phenomenon, in its own terms, in other cultures. Comparative projects were the focus of conferences at Bard Graduate Center in 2004, the Getty Research Institute in 2010, and the Joukowsky Institute at Brown in 2015, and each of these has resulted in a book of essays: Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China 1500-1800 (2012), World Antiquarianism (2013), and Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison (2017).

The time has come to examine the Islamic world in these same terms and with this same care. That is the goal of this conference.