The FWF Special Research Programme (SFB) F42âG18 âVisions of Community â Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400â1600 CE)â, henceforth VISCOM, was an interdisciplinary pioneering project in the field of the âGlobal Middle Agesâ, addressing similarities and differences between social impact of the three major Eurasian religions and investigating how these universal religions shaped the particular communities. Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) between 2011 and 2019, it was also the first major Special Research Programme in the Humanities in Austria.
Entering the new territory of global comparison, VISCOM proposed an interdisciplinary approach to historical comparison, tailor-made to address both fundamental and controversial questions on the complex interrelation between various â religious, socio-political, economic, local, ethnic, and other â forms and âvisionsâ of community during the Middle Ages. On top of the various in-depth case studies carried out by each project part, the whole VISCOM team grouped up across the main project parts into so-called âtransversal working groupsâ (TWG), thus enabling the team members to discuss historical phenomena as well as fundamental concepts and terminology from the perspective of different disciplines and research fields within the various European, Arabic and Tibetan settings under scrutiny. This volume is a result of the continuously challenging interdisciplinary discussions first and foremost within our transversal working group, entitled âUrban Communities and Non-Urban Sites and Centresâ, and VISCOMâs plenary meetings, but also at several international congresses, as for example at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2016 and 2017, and finally in an international workshop on the topic of this book held in Vienna in 2018.
During those years, our working group set off with critically discussing both historical terminology and historiographical perception of city/hinterland distinctions and relations as well as the extent to which communities were considered to take part in it. In order to answer these questions, we subsequently investigated onto different âfunctionsâ of community, particularly in its social, economic, political, legal and religious dimensions. Consequently, we adopted an at the same time interdisciplinary and comparative perspective on the way communities dealt with their natural, structural and social environment in practical terms. As the social practices of members and their interaction with externals essentially (established and) shaped a community, we furthermore scrutinized practical aspects of communal life in urban-rural relation against the background of power politics, legal systems and visions of community in the respective cultural and geographical contexts.
As a result of the joint discussions within our transversal working group and our individual research during the project years, this volume explores the social practices of framing, building, and enacting community in urban-rural relations by comparing case studies from Central and Southeast Europe through the Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula to Central Asia and Tibet. Choosing an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, the contributions focus on a broad spectrum of social practices, discursive and symbolical framing of communities as well as expressions of community in performance and material culture in different regional and cultural contexts. Moreover, conceiving urban and rural communities as being composed of âmultiple layers of communitarian belongingâ, the contributions refer to (and apply) a series of research questions elaborated in a series of international workshops aimed at a coherent linking of the meaning, ideas and discourses about the concept of âcommunitiesâ in the Middle Ages.
As the editors of this volume, we would like to express our gratitude, also in the name of the contributors, towards the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for the generous grant crucial to our endeavour as well as, for all their support, towards both the University of Vienna (Institute for Austrian Historical Research and Institute for East European History) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute for Medieval Research, Institute for Social Anthropology and Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia), where the research was conducted. Moreover, we want to explicitly thank VISCOMâs project leaders Andre Gingrich, Christina Lutter, Walter Pohl and Oliver Schmitt for their immense support and confidence, and in particular also to Helmut Krasser, who â until his sudden passing away in 2014 â has always encouraged us to pursue our own ideas and interests. We would also like to thank Mathias Fermer, who continuously sharpened our view of Tibet, which eventually led to the cooperation with Christian Jahoda and his project team working on Materiality and Material Culture in Tibet and hosted by the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. All those mentioned, and so many other colleagues, had a large share in intellectually inspiring our discussions, temporarily establishing a âsmall communityâ of stimulating scholarly atmosphere and subsidizing our intellectual journey of comparison into the world of the global Middle Ages.
Fabian Kümmeler, Judit Majorossy and Eirik Hovden