Knowledge Cultures and Traveling Concepts

How do we know what we know and how have the conditions of knowledge production changed in the seemingly “deterritorialized” world of the 21st Century? The notion that there is a convergence between a nation, its culture and the types of knowledge produced has long informed assumptions about how and why we know what we know. Yet history reveals the inadequacy of such essentializing assumptions. After the collapse of communism in 1989, scientific developments in the former Soviet Bloc were deemed to be tainted by political interference and a lack of engagement with international scientific developments at the time. However, the pre-1989 ideologically and politically bifurcated world exemplifies how ideas travelled through both formal and informal channels. Moreover, knowledge practices on both sides of the Iron Curtain had similar historical trajectories, biases and interlinkages with politics at the time. The analysis of the development of diagnostic categories such a “neuroses” in pre-1989 socialist East Germany exemplifies how psychological concepts were both intertwined with the socialist project, but also transformed in clinical practice due to national and international networks as well as various local, cultural, and institutional circumstances. The history of the East German psy sciences thus reveal how “travelling concepts” and transnational knowledge practices could supersede the stark East-West divide.