Materials and cultures. The wide world of wild silks For centuries, amongst the many silk-producing insects, Bombyx mori or ‘mulberry silkworm’, native to China, has been extensively reared. It is praised for the fine and shiny long filaments drawn from its cocoons. Yet, other species belonging primarily to the Saturniidae family, qualified as ‘wild’ by silk specialists, have been bred worldwide in local textile industries, while a few species like the Chinese Antheraea pernyi and the Japanese Antheraea yamamai reached the international silk market during the 19th century. However, archeological findings show their long-lasting existence. At least two wild silks species have been used since the 3rd millennium BCE in the Indus valley (contemporary Pakistan), and another species was present during the following millennium in the Aegean. These discoveries and others made in the area comprised between Central Asia and Europe show that wild silks have an enduring past which deserves attention in order to understand the history of silk/silkS as well as the importance/significance of these materials in today’s globalized world. Indeed, these species and the substances they produce are the focus of emerging interests in the domains of economic development, natural resources management, and cultural heritage, and they feature in claims over biological and genetic resources under international property laws (Nagoya protocol). Grounded on both social sciences and sciences of life and materials, WILDSILKS is a cutting-edge project studying the history, the present making, and the role the so-called ‘wild’ silks can play to explore societal and environmental questions. It gathers an interdisciplinary team relying on history, social anthropology, biology, physical and biochemical sciences, as well as sciences of preservation. By working on three scales -substances, local knowledge and practices, and environmental and life shaping- WILDSILKS questions the techniques of production, uses and circulations of wild silks from museum pieces and contemporary material cultures. Through a comparative approach with Bombyx mori substances and cultures, such reflections will permit to integrate wild silks into a global history and anthropology of materials and materialities. By localising wild silks textiles in museum collections, and by determining their species thanks to biological and materials sciences, our project will contribute to the construction of a historic mapping of the uses of each wild silks species. Such a framework could confirm the validity of Aristotle’s and Pliny the Elder’s comments on silk production in the Aegean and trace some inter-regional wild silk circulations, for instance between the Indian sub-continent and Africa through the Indian Ocean. WILDSILKS will also investigate the present sociocultural dimensions of wild silks through ethnographic fieldworks in four areas –India, Southeast Asia, Japan, West Africa– chosen for the vivacity of their wild silks production and use, for their involvement in exchanges of species, substances, and knowledge, for the diversity of their sociotechnical contexts, and for their renewal and/or emerging interests in wild silks. It will question wild silks’ roles as indicators at the interface between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and in relation to environmental, social and economic imbalances. Thus, WILDSILKS’ young team members integrate local and global dimensions to the long history of silkS.

This project stands at the crossroads of cultural history, the history of linguistics, and digital humanities. It will focus on a corpus of Chinese-European dictionaries (end of the 16th c. - beginning of the 19th c.), preserved in manuscript form. First compiled by missionaries, often in collaboration with Chinese who remained anonymous, and later owned by scholars in Europe, they played an essential role in the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, and represent the first steps in the construction of European sinology. The corpus will be studied not only as linguistic data, but also as objects of ongoing globalization and as complex artefacts in which different cultures concretely meet. As these dictionaries are scattered in different countries’ institutions, a preliminary task is to compile a repertory, while analyzing their materiality and collecting information about their circulation, which will feed monographic or key studies. The dictionaries will also be studied as linguistic and pedagogical tools, providing new insights on both the history of linguistics and language learning. Furthermore, dictionary entries will be investigated as sources of information on cultural history, intellectual history, political history, the circulation of knowledge between China and Europe, and the history of the missions. The project also involves the construction of a database, obtained by manuscript digitization, OCR, computer-assisted transcription, and manual transcription. This open-access database will be designed as a searchable archive, destined to serve as a reference tool for researchers. The members of the project will investigate this voluminous, varied, and under-studied manuscript corpus from different perspectives, producing monographic studies in their fields of expertise and collaborating on the elaboration of critical editions of the most important manuscript dictionaries.

The project Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia (CRISEA) brings together Southeast Asian (SEA) and European researchers with 3 objectives. 1. Research. Our previous research shows that SEA is open to multiple forces that drive regional integration through competition for resources and legitimacy. In the current crisis of legitimacy for globalisation, SEA's competing regional integrations present challenges for its people and for ASEAN's framework-building project. We analyse these in sectorally-themed work packages on 'arenas of competition': the environment, the economy, the State, the identity of SEA's people, and the Region. Using an interdisciplinary micro-macro method of analysis, we ask in each case how ASEAN-led regional integration is – and is seen by SEA's people as – part of the problem or part of the solution. CRISEA engages with the work programme's concern with "what ‘region’ means to the peoples of these countries within and beyond the ASEAN context". Closely aligned with the 2015 Joint Communication on EU-ASEAN relations, it enhances the EU's understanding of "the Asia-Pacific as a strategic region for Europe". 2. Policy relevance. CRISEA's research programme was developed for its relevance to EU policy on ASEAN and its member states. Its dissemination strategy innovates by creating mechanisms for dialogue with a targeted audience of policy makers, stakeholders and the public in Brussels and SEA, using briefing sessions, workshops, press coverage, film, public lectures and policy briefs. 3. Networking and capacity building for the European Research Area. Leveraging existing networks of EU-SEA cooperation – the unique EFEO network of 10 field centres in SEA, the IDEAS and SEATIDE projects, EUROSEAS, ASEF – we reinforce the ERA through coordinated academic exchange, joint research and results delivery. Our consortium engages western European and ASEAN scholars with emerging expertise in southern and eastern Europe.