Programmes financés

la liste des principaux projets portés par l’EPHE ou dont l’EPHE est partenaire.

ERC HisTochText – Georges Pinault (1 Octobre 2018 - 31 mars 2024)

HisTochText addresses written Buddhist culture of the northern Silk Road in an innovative and path-breaking way, by going beyond the frontier of disciplines which have been cultivated separately: philology, digital humanities and in-depth analysis of materials, edition of Tocharian texts and comparative Buddhist literature, Sanskrit poetics and narratology, texts and social contexts.
The flourishing Buddhist culture of the northern Silk Road during the 1st millennium CE in the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang (NW China) is known by archaeological findings, artifacts and manuscripts in various languages. Since Buddhism was introduced from India, Sanskrit was the dominant religious language. By contrast, Tocharian belongs to the few local languages that are known to us thanks to Buddhist written culture. The two closely related Tocharian languages (Tocharian A and Tocharian B) were deciphered in 1908 on the basis of manuscripts discovered at the beginning of the past century in Buddhist sites of this region, together with Sanskrit manuscripts.
The collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France issued from the Pelliot expedition is a major collection of Tocharian manuscripts, counting around 2,000 fragments, second only to the Berlin collection, but in comparison hardly investigated, despite its containing numerous unique masterpieces and the broadest cross-section of manuscript and document styles and types. Only one fourth has been edited, mostly in a provisional manner, without translation nor commentary. Many texts of the Pelliot collection, literary and non-literary, are of the utmost importance because they have no match in any other collection of Tocharian manuscripts, nor in Buddhist corpora in other languages. As most Pelliot manuscripts in Sanskrit and in Tocharian were found in Buddhist sites of the Kucha region, the comprehensive edition and analysis of the texts will provide precious information about an important centre of Central Asian Buddhism.

ERC Vietnamica – Philippe Papin (1 November 2019 - 31 October 2024)

The discovery of 40 000 paper stampings reproducing the inscriptions on columns erected between the 16th and 20th century in Vietnam offers a unique opportunity for the study of the Vietnamese society during this period. The inscriptions are written in an idiom that comprises Chinese and local vernacular. These inscriptions are invaluable for the richness in information they contain. The EU-funded VIETNAMICA project will analyse the material to study rural society, religion approaches and economic structures during the five centuries covered by the inscriptions. Popular Buddhism, woman’s role in the gift economy, land ownership and monetisation will be among the studies the project pursues. The stampings will be analysed and studied through advanced digitalised instruments and techniques.
Driven by a general movement in Asia to invest in Classical studies, the project Vietnamica aims for a historical and linguistic study of ancient, invaluable Vietnamese inscriptions, while also helping to determine a ground-breaking method for the use of epigraphic resources. In partnership with Han-Nôm Institute and Vietnam National University, the project is motivated by the recent divulgence of 40,000 paper stampings that reproduce the inscriptions engraved on the surfaces of 25,000 steles erected between the 16th to 20th century in Vietnam. These inscriptions, written in a complex Chinese embedded with the local vernacular, are conserved at the Han-Nôm Institute in Hanoi. Offering an unexpected counterpoint to existing official sources, these inscriptions prompt the study of rural inhabitants, monks and notables across an era of five centuries through their very own language. The project will produce a series of studies on popular Buddhism and its connection to the ancestor cult, donations and the role of women in the economy of gifting, and monetization and land property. Based on these themes, the project will record and analyze the logographic processes that the Vietnamese once used to transcribe the language they spoke. Such research - close to the field and to its people - was once a dream for scholars and is now possible due to the corpus of stampings available. Characteristic of local histories, information is dispersed in fragments all throughout the corpus and it is first necessary to categorize the existing inscriptions. Vietnamica will rely on tools available through digital and computational humanities to construct a database of the stampings, connect it to data mapping, and on a more technical level, proceed with a segmentation of the text to allow for the automatic identification of the demotic characters. The results from the project will converge on a Platform (Vietnamica.eu) that is meant to remain accessible to researchers indefinitely.

RESILIENCE – Denis Pelletier (1er septembre 2019 - 29 février 2021)

The launch of the Horizon 2020 funded project RESILIENCE in September 2019 marked an important step towards an established European Research Infrastructure on Religious Studies. Twelve academic institutions from ten countries have joined forces to undertake this two-year project with the ultimate aim of building a European response to the challenges of religious diversity. Religious diversity presents a growing challenge for European society, resulting in an increased need for mutual understanding. An infrastructure on religious studies will support this understanding through scholarly research, in the conviction that knowledge is the best tool for a shared response to the spike in issues related to religious diversity.
In previous years, preparations have already been made for such a European infrastructure through the ReIReS project, also funded by Horizon 2020. Building upon this, twelve academic institutions from ten countries have joined forces in the RESILIENCE project, which had its kick-off meeting September 6/7 2019 in Bologna. RESILIENCE (REligious Studies Infrastructure: tooLs, Expert, conNections and CEnters) will serve the academic the academic community in the first place, and at the same time will, with its impact, extend significantly to the non-academic community: it offers the tools for an innovative approach of religious studies which can be used to build a European response to the challenge of religious diversity. Currently, RESILIENCE focuses on the preparation of a proposal for an established research infrastructure in religious studies. The proposal will be submitted to the ESFRI Forum on the 5th of May 2020, aiming at becoming part of the ESFRI Roadmap 2021.

Rahui Center – Tamatoa Bambridge (1er novembre 2019 – 30 octobre 2022)

Le projet de Rahui Center est mené par Tamatoa Bambridge (CNRS-CRIOBE) et hébergé au CRIOBE à Moorea. Comme son nom l’indique, le Forum et Centre de ressources Rāhui fournira des ressources essentielles pour soutenir les pêcheurs et les autres communautés intéressées par le renforcement des sites Rāhui existants et la planification des futures zones de ressources marines gérées. Le « Rahui Center » fournira également des ressources et des outils pour évaluer, améliorer et développer les zones de ressources marines gérées qui pourraient devenir des sites Rāhui. Un effort important sera fait pour communiquer la culture et la science du Rāhui à un large public, en particulier la jeunesse tahitienne. Le Rahui Center adoptera une approche culturelle et scientifique globale pour soutenir la gestion et la création de nouveaux sites Rāhui. Il sera dirigé par des dirigeants locaux et s’appuiera sur les coutumes, les traditions et les connaissances locales, tout en s’appuyant sur les sciences de soutien en matière de conservation marine, de planification de l’espace marin et de conception des réserves, de durabilité des pêches et de bioéconomie.
Le rahui est une fermeture temporaire d’une zone, comme une jachère. Il permet à un espace (maritime ou terrestre) de se régénérer. Des suivis de la biomasse des poissons dans le Rahui de la presqu’île de Tahiti permettent de montrer que la zone a une richesse importante après 3 années de protection, par rapport à d’autres zones de l’île. Pour prouver l’efficacité de ces fermetures, il est important de mettre en place des comptages réguliers dans et autour de ces zones. Les écologues et anthropologue du Criobe sont en partenariat avec les acteurs locaux pour assurer l’efficacité des Rahui.