F07

In the project, we examine social-scientific and missionary communities of practice in the German Empire that constructed analogies: first, between the “social question” in the metropole (and metropolitan comparisons of “bourgeois” vs. “workers”) and the “native question” in the colonies (and colonial comparisons of “Germans” and “natives”); and second, between the “Kulturkampf” in the metropole (and metropolitan comparisons between “Protestantism” and “Catholicism”) and the religious situation in the colonies (and colonial comparisons between “European Christendom” and “Islam”). The assumption, which builds on Bourdieu's theory of the genesis of the state, is that the superimposition of the comparisons “departicularized” a bourgeois ideal of the good life and a Protestant norm of religious subjectivity by stylizing them as Germanness as such via contrasts with the colonial "Other."