Mondays | 10.00 – 11.30 (first session: 07.10.2024)
911 Seminarraum S222 (911/EG/0.06)
In recent years, the topic of “human prehistory” has once again received increased popular scientific attention. Grandiose treatises such as Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature as well as David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything promise to enlighten us as to how humans really became human, what makes us human, and where humanity’s journey is headed. In his recently published book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, the renowned historian of ideas Stefanos Geroulanous sets out to show how these red-hot yet controversial debates about the status of the human in the cosmos are fundamentally intertwined with historical processes and the intellectual context of colonialism, imperialism, and the emergence of Western modernity reaching back into the 19th century. It is no coincidence, Geroulanos argues, that the idea of “prehistory” only emerges and gains significance when the discovery of deep-time begins to undermine the foundations of traditional religious worldviews. In this context, “prehistory” grows into a central arena for the negotiation of a new powerful, post-religious mythology. According to Geroulanos, the core concepts, narratives, and tropes of such a “mythology of modernity” are already present in debates on the deep history of humanity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our notion of “prehistory” is therefore primarily shaped by a political project and has much less to do with the actual archaeological “facts” than often claimed. In the seminar, we will read Stefanous Geroulano’s provocative book together and discuss it critically.
Further information for students of the University of Cologne: Klips