Page - 145 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Peter Burke | Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings 145 in the rights of man in the French revolution, and the German tradition of local knowledge, particularism, historicism. It is controversial now, because after the Second World War the UN took this French universalism on board. There is a reaction in so many parts of the world, saying that human rights are an imposition of western culture on other cultures. Should things like female genital mutilation and burning witches in Africa be outlawed, whatever the culture? There is no easy solution. Chakrabarty15 has coined the term of “Provincialising Europe”, asking for a more multi-sided per- spective. Wouldn’t this compromise all universal concepts? That’s right. I think people in the Reformation had a solution. Philip Melanchthon had this idea of adiaphora, things that are not important. There are many situations in which we can just accept cultural difference. But there are a few situations in which we cannot. Although it is arrogant to say that you represent a generic human point of view as supposed to the point of view of your culture you have to make a stand against stoning to death or whatever. But for the rest, let people follow their own customs. III Imagine: a philanthropic Fund with good intentions and least hidden agenda grants five doctoral theses in a historical anthropology of movement(s). As its scientific adviser, which themes would you like to impose? If I were a scientific adviser I don’t think I would recommend the money be spent on individual PhD projects when it could be spent on a multidisciplinary team, which would have histori- ans, anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, economists. The strategy would be comparative: history and sociology of migration today is a wonderful subject to study comparatively. You study people who come to the same place but come from different cultures; or people from the same culture who go to different parts of the world. It’s the nearest to laboratory conditions that the historian could hope for. In the end of the nineteenth century the Italians went to North and South America, to Australia: how were they received in these different places? You do need a collective investigation because it is just too much for individual students. The most they could do would be to study Italians (say) in two cities in two different countries. And then they would have to combine the macro approach how many skilled people, how many women, younger or older people – combine all that with oral history interviews or the study of letters home to reconstruct the experiences of migration, what it felt like to arrive in a new country, how people were treated, whether they made friends outside their language group. Great opportunities have been lost in oral history. I am now interested in the scholars who migrated after Hitler came to power and came to this country. I knew quite a number of them. In the sixties there were so many of them and one could have interviewed them. For the book I 15 Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe : postcolonial thought and historical difference (Princeton NJ: Prince- ton University Press, 2000)