en
Slovenščina
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The international workshop “Materials of Encounter: Intercultural Contacts through Objects and Practices”, organized by the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies of ZRS Koper and the Centre for Asian Cultures of ZRS Koper, will take place on 19 May 2026 in the morning at the Centre for Humanities of ZRS Koper (Kreljeva 6, Koper, Slovenia).
The workshop will explore the role of material objects and practices in shaping intercultural encounters between Europe and Asia. The presentations will examine how objects, images, collections, and museum representations have served as mediators of knowledge, religious ideas, and social relations.
First Session
The first session will focus on the connections between healing beliefs and practices in the context of Sino-European encounters. It will discuss the reasons why Chinese communities in the late Qing period placed their trust in European missionaries, as well as the circulation of Catholic images and healing relics between China and Europe.
Second Session
The second session will address missionary collections and the ways in which objects have been used to represent religions. Contributions will examine Tibetan artefacts in the National Museum of Scotland, missionary exhibitions in interwar Slovenia, and non-European missionary collections housed in the Slovene Ethnographic Museum.
Third Session
The third session will explore the processes of collecting, reinterpretation, and museumization of objects. It will focus on the collecting practices of the Slovenian missionary Peter Baptist Turk in eastern Hubei in the early twentieth century, as well as a detailed analysis of two wanminsan canopies from his collection.
The workshop is organized within the framework of the research project Between Mission and Museum: Missionary Collections in Slovenia and Their Significance Today (ARIS Project No. J6-60114), co-financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS).
