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RESEARCH GROUP

| 40.000 Years of Human Challenges: Perception, Conceptualization and Coping in Premodern Societies

JGU

subject

description

Challenges can be/form/represent starting points of development and change, stagnation and progress as well as success and failure. At least since the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Western Eurasia about 40,000 years ago, both individuals and communities have developed practices to overcome various forms of challenges, challenges we still face today. For a better/deeper understanding of present as well as future challenges and possible solutions, the diachronic and cross-cultural study of short- and long-term developments over the aforementioned time period offers promising data that have so far been ignored in the discussion. Only such a long-term perspective makes it possible to identify patterns of action, continuity and change, as well as key factors in the perception, conceptualization and management of challenges. For this reason, the interdisciplinary profile area is dedicated to the following central research questions: How do people perceive challenges? How do they describe and conceptualize these challenges? What strategies and practices are developed to cope with challenges? In the profile area, perception, conceptualization, and coping are examined as essential, distinct, and yet interrelated processes in how individuals and collectives deal with challenges using a praxeological approach. This serves to form coherent units of inquiry in which historical, archaeological, and textual analytical methods and approaches are fruitfully combined and explored. In doing so, practices as a research object allow us to methodologically unify the heterogeneous empirical foundations of disciplines that study the human past and that have very different material remains, textual sources, and environmental records, without losing sight of the inherent complexity of each discipline. As a result, we are able to examine practices of perception, conceptualization, and coping in innovative ways and make a substantial contribution to a better understanding of how challenges are perceived and coped with.