Board and card games feature a specific lexicon that ranges from the name of the game, the board, the cards and the pieces, to specific stratagems and situations of play. Each type of term has shown potential for understanding game histories.

In this lecture, the potential of using game names and strategic terms is illustrated with contemporary examples from mancala and alquerque-type games found in the Indian Ocean region. More extensive lexicons for card games show the extent to which words have been borrowed from other languages or games and how this points to specific historical distributions of the games themselves.

Biography

Alex de Voogt is a Dutch board game scholar whose work sits at the very foundation of modern board game studies. He organised the first international Board Game Studies Colloquium in 1997 and co-founded the Board Game Studies Journal in 1998. They both continue to this day and have long since become key institutions in the field.

De Voogt has a background in game psychology, but often collaborates across disciplines with researchers from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and elsewhere. He has published numerous books and articles and conducted extensive fieldwork in the Near East, on the African continent, and among island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

De Voogt is currently a professor at Drew University, New Jersey.

Organizer(s)

• Anuj Misra (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science/ Freie Universität Berlin, Wissensgeschichte des Altertums)
• Ole Birk Laursen (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Contact and Registration

We welcome both internal and external guests to this event. For further information, please contact Anuj MISRA or Ole Birk Laursen.

Registration: TBA.

About This Series

Organized by the Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA) Research Group, the High Gravity Talks series aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue by bringing leading voices to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). Each year, ASTRA invites a few distinguished and world-renowned scholars to Berlin to deliver public lectures on topics relevant to the group’s research into Eurasian astral sciences, broadly defined, and to engage with a broader academic and public audience. While organized within the remit of ASTRA, the High Gravity Talks will resonate beyond the group’s immediate focus, creating innovative synergies with other departments and research groups across the MPIWG and attracting a diverse audience of students, academics, and interested members of the public.

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