This WP primarily emphasizes the cultural rather than political aspects of culture contact through the agency of foreign objects, ideas, and people, focusing on translation and mediation processes. It looks forward to WP 10 because of a joint interest in literary anchoring. In WP 9 the focus is on culture contact within the context of emerging world power Rome. In the process of cultural translation, media may be replaced with other media, and the experiential modalities of similar phenomena may change. E.g., in the study of fragments of Roman literature, scholars have tended to attach great weight in their reconstructions to potential Greek models. This creates room for questions with wider ramifications for the concepts of anchors and anchoring themselves, and in that sense this WP builds on phase 1. The progressive step is that at this point anchoring across different genres will be studied, rather than within the same genre. We investigate whether it is necessary to finetune concepts in order to provide an adequate description of processes of intermediality. Are all translation processes a form of anchoring? And if so, what kind of anchoring?
When do such anchoring processes start? In Antiquity itself? Or mainly in the history of scholarship (see WP 12 for the PD working on this latter possibility)? What do these case studies reveal about the fluidity or ambiguity of anchors? Is experience in and of itself knowledge? Or is knowledge situated or embodied in experience (situated/embodied cognition).
