Project description
Understanding 21st century global iconoclasm
Iconoclasm is the destruction of images by individuals and/or institutions. Why do such acts of iconoclasm retain their social and political relevance today? The ERC-funded ICONS project aims to find out. It will study iconoclasm as a cultural phenomenon across historical and geographical contexts. It will examine iconoclasm as a political expression in modern liberal democracies. This includes the destruction of monuments associated with the fall of the Soviet era, and with racism and colonialism in the West. The project will also consider key aspects of iconoclasm, such as group building, historical truth-seeking, and performative justice for marginalised communities. This project is designed to contribute to our understanding of conflicts in modern societies.
Objective
This research project addresses iconoclasm (the deliberate destruction of images and visual signs) as a transhistorical and transversal cultural phenomenon, carried out by individuals, grass-root movements, or institutions of power across the globe. Whereas previous research established structural similarities between instances of religious and political iconoclasm of the past, this project intends to provide a socio-anthropological analysis of the contemporaneous dimension of iconoclasm, as a form of political expression in modern liberal democracies. Why do acts of iconoclasm continue to be socially and politically meaningful for many actors in different contexts? Perceiving the spectacular destruction of monuments - from those associated with the end of the Soviet era in Eastern Europe to those representing the racist and colonial power in Western societies - as a visual and behavioural manifestation of radical social transformations, the project explores three hypotheses, elucidating the persistence of iconoclasm as a recurrent feature in the modern, globalised world. They are related to three facets of iconoclasm, perceived as a form of immediate group-building (1), as a form of historical truth-seeking (2), and as a form of performative justice-making for underrepresented communities and causes (3), processes that are respectively oriented towards the present (1), the past (2), and the future (3). This project sets out to break new ground in anthropological research by envisioning and crafting a cross-contextual analytical framework that transcends state-of-theart regional and politico-historical divisions. By employing a comparative ethnographic methodology, based on three extended casestudies, interpreting acts of iconoclasm in post-colonial, post-socialist and liberal contexts, this project significantly enhances anthropological interpretations of conflict in contemporary societies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1202 Geneve
Switzerland
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