03.11.2026 John Mansfield

The "history of ideas" has been almost exclusively studied in Eurasia, where it can be traced via literary traditions stretching back some 3000 years. But how can we expand the scope of such enquiry, for example to investigate how ideas spread among the Aboriginal populations of Australia in the late Holocene, or how concepts spread with the mass migrations between Papua and SE Asia? Such research is now possible, thanks to innovations in linguistics and anthropology. In this talk I propose a framework for understanding how different types of conceptual structures are transmitted through populations and geographic regions, and illustrate examples of the kinds of questions that can be asked.