Conference Report — Centenary of the Prague Oriental Institute 2022

Conference Report: Oriental Studies and Research (not only) in Central Europe. Conference organized to mark the centenary of the Prague Oriental Institute, September 5–7, 2022, Prague

We had the pleas­ure of being part of the Ori­ent­al Stud­ies and Research (not only) in Cent­ral Europe con­fer­ence in Prague, organ­ised by Dr Tomáš Pet­rů (Ori­ent­al Insti­tute of the Czech Academy of Sci­ences) and Dr Adéla Jůnová Mack­ová (Mas­aryk Insti­tute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sci­ences). The con­fer­ence is part of a series of events com­mem­or­at­ing the cen­ten­ary of the Ori­ent­al Insti­tute in Prague.

Dur­ing his wel­come speech, Tomáš Pet­rů com­men­ted that “all things are con­nec­ted”, and through­out the con­fer­ence, this became appar­ent. Although hail­ing from dif­fer­ent dis­cip­lines, com­mon themes emerged in the 21 papers presen­ted. The most sali­ent, per­haps, were those observed by Hana Navrátilová (Uni­ver­sity of Oxford) in the clos­ing remarks of her pan­el “The Devel­op­ment of Near and Middle East­ern Stud­ies”. She iden­ti­fied two key factors that influ­enced and shaped the devel­op­ment of Ori­ent­al Stud­ies in Europe: 1) loc­al con­texts; and 2) transna­tion­al net­works. The lat­ter, in par­tic­u­lar, fre­quently sur­faced dur­ing the con­fer­ence. Šárka Velhartická’s paper, for example, touched on how it was com­mon­place for schol­ars in Czechoslov­akia to travel to neigh­bour­ing Ger­­­man-speak­­ing coun­tries to study Ancient Near East­ern stud­ies, whilst Ron­ald Ruzicka and Petra Aign­er (Aus­tri­an Academy of Sci­ences) drew atten­tion to the extens­ive cor­res­pond­ence that took place between the Aus­tri­an Arabist, Eduard Glaser, and aca­dem­ics scattered across Europe and North America.

The Development of a Discipline? Tibetan Studies in Europe

These two strands were also present in our con­tri­bu­tion, ‘The Devel­op­ment of a Dis­cip­line? Tibetan Stud­ies in Europe’, which intro­duced the lives and con­tri­bu­tions of four pion­eers of the field. Using quotes and visu­al mater­i­als from our archive, we sought to trace the aca­dem­ic tra­ject­ory of our inter­viewees: how and why did they become inter­ested in Tibet? What was their exper­i­ence of pur­su­ing their interest(s) at uni­ver­sity? Were there chal­lenges and obstacles, and how did they deal with these? What were their major con­tri­bu­tions to the field? In fol­low­ing the lives of these pion­eers, it was clear that loc­al cir­cum­stances, espe­cially due to the chan­ging geo­pol­it­ic­al land­scape of Cent­ral Europe, had a marked impact on their research and stud­ies. For example, Géza Bethlenfalvy’s attempts to enter uni­ver­sity were ini­tially blocked for two years by the regime as his father’s fam­ily had been landowners.

How­ever, transna­tion­al networks—established through con­fer­ences and correspondence—were, to an extent, a coun­ter­agent. Bey­ond a means of con­nect­ing with peers and exchan­ging ideas, it sup­por­ted the endeav­ours of our pion­eers and embed­ded them with­in the bud­ding com­munity of Tibet­o­lo­gists in Europe and fur­ther afield. Marek Mejor recalls being cut off from West­ern aca­demia in 1970s Poland, as no schol­arly con­tacts to or pub­lic­a­tions from the West were avail­able. For­tu­nately, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Hun­gary was the strong­hold of Tibet­o­logy. With the likes of Józ­sef Ter­jék, András Róna-Tas, Lajos Ligeti and Géza Beth­len­falvy, there were sev­er­al schol­ars work­ing on a vari­ety of sub­jects and equipped with a sol­id lib­rary. Barış Yılmaz’s excel­lent con­fer­ence present­a­tion on Hun­gari­an Turko­logy and Alta­ic Stud­ies reit­er­ated this apprais­al. Mejor also recalls the kind­ness of schol­ars such as Michael Hahn, who provided a few cop­ies of his clas­sic­al Tibetan text­book for Mejor to use when he began teach­ing Clas­sic­al Tibetan at the Uni­ver­sity of Warsaw in 1985.

The value and poten­tial of transna­tion­al inter­ac­tion and col­lab­or­a­tion were on dis­play at the con­fer­ence itself. The warmth shown and the range of dis­cus­sions we had with oth­er pan­el­lists have encour­aged fur­ther thoughts and ideas for the pro­ject, rein­forced the import­ance of inter­dis­cip­lin­ary dis­course, and led us in unex­pec­ted dir­ec­tions. We look for­ward to con­trib­ut­ing to the pro­ceed­ings and to future collaborations!

An exhibition on the ground floor of the Academy of Sciences was also prepared for the centenary.