What role does context play in our ability or willingness to translate from one language to another?

Form and Content: Questioning Expectations

Starting with a recent exhibit at the Bode Museum in Berlin, which students can access and navigate both
through a Google archive of the event and a special app (see links below), this section of the course examines
the challenges of expectations. When we assume that everything similar to one culture should look the same
in another culture, are we not in danger of confusing form with content? What role does context play in our
ability or willingness to translate from one language to another?

Week IV Objects in Context
September 29 Beyond Compare
Exhibition:
https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/unvergleichlich/pgKS3o1oSaFu
Lg

App: https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/bode-
museum/about-us/whats-new/detail/a-new-app-a-comprehensive-
education-and-outreach-programme-and-over-60000-visitors-to-beyond-
compare-art-from-africa-in-the-bode-museum/

Week V People in Context
October 6 Anton Wilhelm Amo

Selections from Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human
Difference; Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2015).

ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS (1200 words): Hegel suggested that there were profound differences between the history
of Europe and the African past. However, just two generations earlier Amo suggested a more sophisticated
method that looked beyond forms and highlighted what me might call content but which he called “spirit.”
Using the handout from the first week from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, use the exhibit
Beyond Compare and Amo’s philosophical insights to critique Hegel’s idea of the incommensurability of
Western/European and African history. Due: October 17th.

Please follow these instructions carefully.
No plagiarism
Good quality work with good vocabulary and analysis please
Thank you!
Contextual Knowledge needed in the links below

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