Two New ERC CZ Projects Coming to the Institute of Ethnology

The ERC CZ programme provides Czech national funding for excellent projects that succeeded in the European ERC competition but did not receive European funding due to the limited capacity of the EU budget. The Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences has now secured support for two such projects.

Dr Hedwig Amalia Waters has received funding for Desert Wilds (DesWilds), a project focusing on the comparative study of two medicinal plants: liquorice in Central Asia and desert ginseng in Inner Mongolia. The project will examine contemporary experiments with so-called “wild simulation”, a form of cultivation that imitates wild natural conditions, and will contribute to a better understanding of transformations in traditional Chinese medicine, ecological harvesting, and plant-based economies.

The second project, Science and Belief: Shaping the Boundaries between Occultism and Science in Cold War Parapsychology, has been awarded to Dr Pavel Horák. The research will examine the relations between occultism and science, and the role of belief in connecting or separating scientific and occult concepts. Through the example of parapsychological research during the Cold War, especially in the United States and the Soviet Union, the project will develop a new epistemological model explaining the shifting boundaries between scientific knowledge and occult ideas during the Cold War.