This collection seeks to contribute to the many long-standing discussions on modernity, but also and more specifically to the more recent debates over trends to pluralize modernity. These debates are current in many different academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature and postcolonial studies. Hitherto, most engagements with modernity in the plural have remained conspicuously confined to one or other intra-disciplinary notion of modernities, such as that of Shmuel Eisenstadt's "multiple modernities" which has triggered a host of conference papers and publications largely within sociology: all the while, it seems that the literatures, for instance, of multiple modernities and alternative modernities are each distinguished by the fact that one ignores the other. It is the principal aim of this edited volume to subject these disciplinary discussions to a more encompassing view, assembling contributions from different scholars who not only work in different disciplines and regional settings, but who also engage with their research topics in a variety of approaches and at different levels of analysis. The volume thus transcends the sometimes narrow boundaries of the debates over modernities within the established academic disciplines and seeks to turn the unavoidable friction brought about by this interdisciplinary setting into most original and insightful scholarship.

Dieser dem 2008 emeritierten Zurcher Sinologen Robert H. Gassmann gewidmete Band enthalt siebzehn Beitrage aus dem Kreis seiner Fachkolleginnen und -kollegen. Die einzelnen Studien umfassen historisch und disziplinar verschiedene Arbeitsbereiche des Faches Sinologie, von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, von der Archaologie bis zur Kulturwissenschaft. Den Forschungsschwerpunkten Robert Gassmanns entsprechend bilden philologisch-historische Arbeiten zu chinesischen Texttraditionen einen Schwerpunkt. Daneben befassen sich mehrere Beitrage mit bestimmten Aspekten der Han-Zeit, mit den Grabfunden von Mawangdui und mit dem Zhuangzi.