Two rendezvous at Munster: the 32nd German oriental studies conference and the 2nd board meeting of EAAA

The article is devoted to the 32nd conference of orientalists in Germany, which took place from 23 to 27 September 2013 at the University of Westphalia in Münster. The conference was established in 1921 at the initiative of the German Oriental Society and is held regularly every three years. The forum was attended by 1,300 people (the working languages ​​of the conference were German and English). In 23 sections, 900 reports were heard, among which three reports were made by employees of the Department of Oriental Studies of the Humanities Faculty of Novosibirsk State Research University. At the opening ceremony of the conference, prominent European scientists and professors, such as Oskar von Hinyuber, Gudrun Kremer and others, spoke. The sections under the guidance of professors of the largest universities worked synchronously, which, on the one hand, made it possible to hear a large number of reports, but, on the other hand, created some inconvenience when the timing of speeches on topics of interest coincides. The priority sections for the staff of the Department of Oriental Studies at NSU were Sinological, Japanese and Korean Studies. They covered a wide chronological and thematic range, from the problems of interpretation of the original texts of Confucius and Mencius to the role of Christianity in modern China and human rights in North Korea. The conference program also included visits to several museums - the Museum of Archeology, the Museum of Lacquer Art and the Museum of Painting of East and Southeast Asia with a permanent exhibition by Pablo Picasso and a temporary exhibition of paintings by the impressionist Camille Pissaro. The participants of the congress also managed to visit the open-air museum Mühlenhof, which contains a collection of rural buildings in Münster and its environs. The conference also hosted the second meeting of the Board of the European Association for Asian Art and Archeology (EAAA), founded in November 2012 at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). The meeting discussed current organizational and financial issues, as well as problems related to the support of various international funds and organizations. The next meeting of the members of the Association is scheduled for September 2014 within the framework of the first EAAA conference at Palacky University (Olomouc, Czech Republic). Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, chief researcher of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor N.V. Polosmak, who will present the results of her expeditions to Mongolia related to the study of objects of Chinese art in the Hunnic burials, was invited as a special guest of the conference with a plenary report.