This paper studies the concept of “hominisation” in terms of the dialectic between rupture and continuity. To this effect, it takes into account a number of scholarly approaches belonging to dif-ferent disciplines (neurobiology, ethnology, linguistics). Through these discourse, the author shows how the concept of hominisation escapes the Darwinian narrative, and belongs rather to a mythological dimension. As such, it plays a role in the process of building a specifically human identity, as opposed to an animal one.

We hear frequently about the crisis of the humanities. The crisis of the humanities we experience nowadays is due to the economic logic of the capitalist system that everything is evalu-ated according to economic and social utility. Deeper reason for the crisis could be found in modern and contemporary humanities which lost their ideal of cultivating humanity for better life by nourishing human heart and mind. Philosophy confronts the same crisis by becoming a science, or the science providing ground for other sciences, and stopping to ask and reflect on the meaning of life. Other extreme is to make philosophy just a writing. At this point Kant is invited to suggest the way for philosophy between science and writing. Philosophy has at least three necessary conditions: human’s thinking ability (arguments and counterarguments), the practice of this talent on available texts, and a vast field of concrete life. Philosophy is not merely a science, a doctrine and not merely an edifying discourse, but also and primarily a way of life to control one’s passion, to rectify one’s heart and mind and to reflect on the meaning of life.

This paper integrates concepts from philosophy and Zen Buddhism in order to define the implications of an American Zen Master’s sermon about the 2009 financial crisis. It interprets three aspects of his sermon: his critique of modernity, his reflection on the experience of Zen meditation (shikan-taza), and his version of Buddhist ontology (tathāgata-garbha). The paper shows that his sermon is an innovative problematization of what it is to be a modern subject or, still more generally, what it is to exist historically. Each of its three aspects indicates a different, perhaps even opposed, response to this problem. Yet they all suggest new configurations of temporality, historicity, and Being. The paper argues that it is precisely this mobile adjacency to the dominant modernist perspective which makes the Zen Master’s sermon both ethically and intellectually effective. Recruiting him into a Nietzschean lineage, it concludes with a programmatic statement of how work in the human sciences could develop his insights.

This paper presents the concept of “active art” as it was shaped throughout the history of Chinese art. It insists on the seminal role of calligraphy to that effect and to the birth of an artistic consciousness in China.

A new notion of language can play an important role in developing a new understanding of knowledge and the humanities. I believe that language gives rise to pluralism not only because different verbal languages force us to see the world differently, but also because any object that can be per-ceived by humans or can be processed digitally is in need of interpretation. Consequently, our notion of knowledge needs to be communal rather than absolutistic, and our response to the contemporary human predicament needs to invoke active rather than passive freedom. These two conditions appear to suggest the possibility of building a bridge between the humanities in the academic world and the humanities in the cultural markets.

The International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA) has recently been addressing concerns about the unequal distribution of resources around the globe and challenges from post-colonial societies to the older methods and concepts of Western art history. At the CIHA congress in Melbourne in January 2008, one of the key issues for discussion was the extent to which we need to re-think the discipline of the history of art “in order to establish cross-cultural dimensions as fundamental to its scope, method and vision”. The national association of South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) proposed continuing these discussions in the colloquium ‘Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa and the Global South’, held at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in January, 2011.

A principal focus of the discussions took the ‘other view’, that is the view from the Global South. What if the centres of intellectual and financial power are reversed? What if the ‘developing world’ becomes the ‘first world’? If South becomes North? In short, we tried to imagine a public intellectual space where such polar reversals can happen, and where new histories of art can emerge which are not necessarily centred on Western-based systems, nor dependent on the West for validation.

This paper explores some of questions central to this debate, and provides a tentative framework for its central aim, viz. to complicate the history of art and the relationship between histories in the Global South and the ‘North’ or ‘West’.

In the art biennales of today, video has become, like it or not, a universal tool, a sort of “green card” for today’s art. It forms a convenient platform, especially when used with subtitles and especially for the artists of emerging countries, as long as they have access to this technique.

Could the art history film equally become a language shared by the community of art historians? This type of film is characterised by the collaboration of a filmmaker and an art historian, such as occurred when Roberto Longhi and Umberto Barbaro together produced their film Carpaccio in 1948. Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim and Carlo Argan have analysed cinema in this regard. Others have practised it in undertaking art history: Kenneth Clark is one example. Another is Carlo Ragghianti, who made 20 critofilms between 1948 and 1964 which he defined as “a reading and a critical analysis of artistic language realised through the visual language of cinema”.

Is our contemporary era, marked as it is by the globalisation of art and the proliferation of films on art (documentaries, “art films”, experimental films, biopics), beginning thus to create its own art history? If so, of which sort?

This art history through film has a comparative intention, marked by a re-reading of the art of the past, in the way that Bill Viola, for example, is enlivening painting. It has the potential to transform connoisseurship by enabling a new relationship to emerge between the eye and the artwork, but it is also a post-colonial history which bursts the boundaries between ethnographic films like those of Flaherty or Les Maîtres fous of Jean Rouch (1954) or Les Statues meurent aussi of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and films of today’s highly ritualised “performance art” manifestations. As well it brings consideration to new approaches, such as those of the neuro-sciences and questions the force of images (David Freedberg) and their “agency” (Gell). Henri Storck has written: “The eye of the camera is much more powerful than our own”.

In his book L’Intemporel (1973), Malraux wrote that “the museum of the audio-visual” had replaced the “museum of the imaginary”. With video and digital art, the art history film has entered a new era, while still remaining an important element of the teaching of art history, as had been wished for from very early on since the 1950s by the art historian Pierre Francastel.

Already in the 1960s UNESCO played an important part in searching out and compiling an inventory of resources relating to film on art. Such investigation needs to be resumed today. But above all, it is the history of the “art history film” which still remains to undertaken at a time when the challenges of a now polycentred world are sketching out a different future.

Arabic is an important language in several respects, and there is a long history of contact between Muslims and the non-Muslim West which justifies the study of Islamic culture. The relations between the two are briefly described, as a background to the consequences of 19th century imperialism. The paper then examines the dual linguistic status of Arabic, as a language both of revelation and everyday intercourse. The unique rôle of the Islamic Adam as the first speaker of Arabic leads to a discussion of the power vested in Arabic by virtue of its religious function. To maintain its power an educational system was developed to train scholars to preserve the enormous archive of literary material which records the history of Islam and guarantees its survival, increasing the dependence of Islam upon Arabic. However, the religion does not suppress individuality, and the paper argues that Arabic literature is full of humanist observations on the strengths and weakness of mankind, all of us sons of Adam. The current situation of Classical Arabic is then reviewed: because it cannot change there cannot be (or not yet) a Reformation of the kind which happened in Europe, although contemporary written Arabic is gradually drifting away from the Classical standard. But the written language retains its power as the final recourse for all Islamic matters, and is now also playing a political rôle at the UN. Some recent studies of the use of Arabic in various domains are briefly mentioned, and the influence of Western linguistics on the teaching of Arabic, together with a fleeting glance at the effect of computers on the way the Qur’an is now experienced. The paper concludes by asking whether dialogue is possible or even necessary, with a negative answer. Instead a humanist approach is recommended, one in which Arabic culture is studied not for its intellectual challenges alone, but to enable us to recognise fellow sons of Adam across the borders of language.

Commencing with the argument that modern art history is rooted in fifteenth- and early six-teenth-century Italy, a period of unusual primacy for the ‘eye’, the author provides an over-view of the history of art history: from its foundation as a university discipline to its recent bipolarity. In the 1980s art history devolved into a state of confusion. At the same time, con-noisseurship, a primary and indispensable foundation for training in art history, went into decline. This state of affairs resulted from the penetration of the language-based disciplines into the realm of art historical study, since their approaches are not predicated upon direct access to the art object. Counter to this trend, however, the author argues that art history is a humanistic discipline that begins with the careful viewing of an individual work of art or visual object, and works outward toward the building up of a historical, geographical and worldwide map of art.

A close examination of the limitations of a globally-oriented approach (that is, world art studies or world art history) and a regionally-oriented practice that could be categorized as a traditional form of art history, leads the author to consider the future of art history in Japan. He proposes a comparative approach as a promising way of bridging Western and Japanese art history, as practiced both inside and outside Japan, in future years.

This article demonstrates how art history investigates the perception of art at a moment when a main axiom of effect and understanding of an object turns out to be variable; the question of the “where?”

Today the old hermeneutical problem of historical distance is replaced with a geographical challenge, namely that of geographical distance. Not only does the beholder travel more extensively than ever, but also the artwork itself, the object of interpretation, shifts from one context to another. Thus, the beholder often does not fit within the original context in which the work was produced and is therefore constantly looking at “the other”.

The author discusses contemporary art and new frameworks of understanding that have become more complex in evoking expectations about the art work as a reference system, as they relate to the beholder’s own position to places far away. Concepts which again imply a universal language of art again (e.g. neuroscience) have to be contrasted with both the artist and the audience’s desire for the specific, the different.

The pilgrimage church at Ptujska Gora, built around 1400 and devoted to the Virgin of Mercy, is recognized as one of the most highly regarded and valued examples of cultural heritage in Slovenia. Pilgrims, of course, began to determine the nature of the site from the beginning of the 15 th century on and a significant number of images depicting the pilgrims to Ptujska Gora have been produced over the centuries. These images provide valuable insight into the demographic shifts in the quintessential Ptujska Gora pilgrim over time. In the 15 th century, noblemen and clergymen were portrayed as donators, closely connected to the Virgin (for example, the relief in the main altar with 82 figures under the cloak of the Virgin, and the predella of the altar of Our Lady of the Rosary and the frescoes in the Cross Chapel). In the 17 th and 18 th century it is appar-ent that the most devoted pilgrims came from the middle classes (see the copper engraving by Wolfgang Kilian, depicting eight miracles). From the 19 th century on, peasants and pilgrims from the lower classes attracted the attention of artists (such as Alois Kasimir and France Mihelič). Up until the 1970s, the pilgrims to Ptujska Gora typically reflected the structure of socialist society in which religion was unwelcome; their images were systematically recorded by the photographer Stojan Kerbler.

Everywhere in Europe the humanities, and within the humanities particularly the study of languages and literatures, are increasingly under pressure from reductions in staff numbers and research funding. This is a pity, because the capital – both cultural and economic - the humanities, and the study of languages and literatures, represent is considerable. Moreover, boosting the humanities requires relatively little investment, certainly in comparison to the pure and exact sciences. However, the humanities should not expect to be saved by simply continuing in the tracks of the last century or so. Instead, they should aim to better ‘sell’ themselves in the era of globalization.

Central Europe is a mixture of multi-ethnical regions, with a stormy past and many cross-cultural connections. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the birth of several nation-states that used cultural heritage constructs to legitimize their existence, demonstrating their long history and supposed cultural superiority. Characteristics of the minds of the different nations were searched for in the field of art history, too. The old and new states published series of “national” art histories in the second half of the 20th century.

Simultaneous with these “national” art histories was the contradictory notion of using art to promote a unified Europe. Instigated by the political changes of 1989/90, collective actions were brought to the region in the form of several international exhibitions, presenting topics such as Baroque art in Central Europe or “Central Europe around 1000”. Organized through international cooperation is the preparation of a nine-volume hand book on the history of art in Eastern-Central Europe, discussed in a European context.

A novelty of the convention of the Council of Europe (Faro 2005) is the definition of “heritage community”. According to it groups and/or individuals have the right to express their affinity to any part of European heritage, independently of ownership and localization, and anybody, alone or within a community, may belong to several heritage communities. Interpretations can and will be different, but the right to have access to material and sources of the common heritage has already started to be accepted.

Humanities and social sciences have so far adopted an approach keeping Europe at the heart of the scientific debates, to the detriment of the other continents and thus, of the other cultures in the world, relegated to the periphery of the dynamics of intellectual reflection and production. This Eurocentrism is also evident in the economic, socio-cultural, political and religious fields. The case of the relationships between Africa and Europe is quite enlightening.

The recent crisis, which is not only financial and economic but also cultural and more generally societal, reveals a loss of sense reinforced by the attempt to standardize the world’s cultures induced by the accelerated globalization leading to a real dehumanization of the relationships between individuals, peoples and States.

It is urgent to make a paradigm shift through the reconstruction of humanities and social sciences, in the perspective of a polycentrism based on cultural and linguistic diversity in the world and capable of strengthening the dialogue between cultures and civilizations, and therefore, peace in the world.