Martin Puchner

In the organizer's words:

Culture: a new history of the world.

From Cave Art to K-Pop - and the role of cultural appropriation

• Literature

"A clear rejection of those who claim that culture can be the property of groups, nations, religions or ethnicities." The New York Times

On a journey from the Chauvet Cave in France through classical Greece, Nefertiti's Egypt, the libraries of the Aztecs, Ashoka's India, and other eras: This entertaining Big History by German-American literary scholar Martin Puchner reveals the origins and causes of human culture - and how cultural appropriation in particular made this possible.

Martin Puchner provides a captivating account of why we have only been able to develop our abilities through culture, and how it has driven societies forward over the centuries and ensured our survival through our encounters, collective losses and rediscoveries, imitations and adoptions. Culture can therefore not be seen as a resource of a single group, but is created in exchange with others, as a borrowed form and fusion of ideas - through drawing, speaking, storing knowledge. Like a giant recycling project, small fragments are retrieved from the past and used anew. Puchner provides an exciting new look at humanity and makes an important contribution to the debate on originality and cultural appropriation.

Martin Puchner, born in Erlangen in 1969, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard and a multi-award-winning author. He is the author and editor of numerous books, which have also been translated into German, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Price information:

Normal € 11.90 Reduced € 9.90 Members € 6.90 Surcharge at the Box Office