Fachspezifische Spezialisierung/Sommersemester 2025
Ort: Rote Infobox / Kreuzung Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg und Johannes-v.-Müller-Weg
Zeit: mittwochs, 12:00–14:00
Unser fachinternes Kolloquium dient dem inhaltlichen Austausch der Mitarbeitenden der Kulturanthropologie/Europäischen Ethnologie und Gastvortragende aus anderen Universitäten im In- und Ausland und ist also Treffpunkt intellektueller Diskurse. An ausgewählten Terminen im Semester werden aktuelle oder geplante Forschungsvorhaben, Veröffentlichungen und Projekte vorgestellt und diskutiert. Studierende sind herzlich eingeladen, an der Veranstaltung teilzunehmen, um einen Einblick in die Arbeit der Mitarbeitenden zu erhalten und sich am aktuellen Forschungsdiskurs zu beteiligen. Es ist nach Rücksprache mit dem Fach bzw. Studienmanagement auch möglich, diese Veranstaltung als Ersatz für ausgewählte Lehrveranstaltungen zu besuchen.
Directions in European Ethnology
Leitung: Čarna Brković
16.04. “Ethnography, collaboration, critique. Lessons learned from feminist and queer anthropology”, Beate Binder (HU)
It is becoming increasingly clear that we are living in dark times - and it does not seem that we have reached the point where the night is at its deepest and the day at its closest, as the band Ton, Steine, Scherben hopefully put it. Starting from Sherry Ortner’s lucid analysis of anthropological theory production (Ortner: Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties, 2016), I will follow the desire for another possible world that is so deeply embedded in feminist gender and queer studies, and think about the possibilities of doing engaged anthropology in terms of a utopian longing for the better. Furthermore, I will discuss the role of critique in times of crisis and in the face of a polarised public debate. Against this backdrop, I am interested in the possibilities of ethnography in these times of crisis.
24.04. (Donnerstag!!!) “Redistributive imaginaries: Digitalization, Culture and Prosocial Contribution” (research project presentation)
Rebecca Brammall (University of the Arts, London)
Moritz Ege (University of Zürich)
Janne Autto (University of Lapland)
Merce Oliva (University of Pompeu Farba)
Carna Brkovic (University of Mainz)
Discussant: Andrea Muehlebach (University of Bremen)
ReDigIm is a collaborative research project that investigates the meanings and practices of prosocial giving in the context of digitalization in contemporary Europe. It is carried out by a consortium of five universities located in the UK, Finland, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.
Digitalization processes are rapidly reconfiguring access to and engagement with redistributive mechanisms, initiating new forms of payment and contribution. ReDigIm examines collective, common-sense understandings of these new forms of contribution and redistribution, and considers their implications for the future of tax systems and welfare states in Europe.
At the Mainz colloquium, the research team will present its findings, while Advisory Board member Andrea Muehlebach will serve as a discussant.
07.05. “People and Identities in Nueva Germania“, Jonatan Kurzwelly (PRIF – Leibniz-Institut für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, Frankfurt)
Nueva Germania, a rural Paraguayan settlement, was founded at the end of the nineteenth century as a racist, eugenic, and anti-Semitic project. Its founders, Bernhard Förster and Elisabeth Nietzsche, hoped to create the nucleus for a new Germanic empire far away from Jewish influence. This history is often used to portray present-day inhabitants of Nueva Germania through a reductive prism of events long past. Nueva Germania is, however, a place where different identities and ways of life intertwine, providing an excellent historical and ethnographic point of departure. This seminar, based on recently published monograph, will present an argument that social identities—such as nationality, ethnicity, or race—are best understood as things we do and stories we tell, rather than things we are. The illusory sense that identities constitute fixed and essential characteristics of people can partially be explained through the significance attributed to identities in the process of generating a sense of a continuous and persistent self. An elaboration on this link between social and personal identities elucidates the basis for an anti-essentialist theory. Contesting essentialist and identitarian modes of thought is an urgent undertaking not only in social theory, but also as a political act in the context of the global rise of movements and ideologies that prey on such logic.
[If anyone would like to have a look before the seminar, the book can be downloaded for free here: https://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de/handle/3/isbn-978-3-86395-636-3 ]
21.05. “Geteilte Welten – a Multisensorial Intervention into Berlin’s Memory Landscapes”, Miriam Schickler (University of Kassel)
The audiowalk Geteilte Welten reads the different Holocaust memorials as well as other public sites in and around Berlin Tiergarten through one another for their various entanglements and links histories of National-socialism with colonial and migration histories. It hopes to transform what Mihaela Mihai refers to as the “mnemonic habitus”, which in the German context is increasingly characterised by a dogmatic stance on the singularity of the Holocaust and the absolute distinction of antisemitism from other forms of racism. By tracing various histories of violence along different sensorial modes Geteilte Welten hopes to enable a renegotiation of these increasingly sedimented binaries. It transforms the entangled histories into multisensory experiences and embodied counter-movements that traverse the spatial and discursive order of Germany's hegemonic memory landscapes. Through Geteilte Welten I aim to understand what is known by sensing and whether this knowledge can interrupt the cognitive and affective investments in essentialist binary narratives about racialised violence in Germany. Can listening as a space formed by the unheard produce new forms of knowledge that can transcend the divisions between marginalised subjectivities in order to form future alliances?
11.06. Presentation of the book “Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe”, Agnieszka Pasieka (University of Montreal)
Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. "Living Right" provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences.
02.07. „Sichern, aktivieren, ausschließen? Einblicke in die ethnografische Sozial(staats)regimeanalyse“, Dr. Lisa Riedner, Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft und Europäische Ethnologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Die Emmy Noether-Nachwuchsgruppe „Auseinandersetzungen um ‚das Soziale‘ – Hin zu einer bewegungs- basierten ethnografischen Sozial(staats)regimeanalyse“ (DFG, 2022 –2028) arbeitet eng mit mehrsprachigen Basisinitiativen prekär beschäftigter und erwerbsloser Personen in krisengeschüttelten Städten des globalen Nordens zusammen. Bisher haben wir die Arbeit von drei Initiativen in Deutschland über mehrere Monate ethnografisch begleitet. Mein besonderes Interesse galt dabei Auseinandersetzungen um Sozialhilfebetrug. In diesem Vortrag möchte ich den Fragen nachgehen: Wie äußert sich der staatliche Kampf gegen Betrug und welche Effekte hat er? Wer nimmt an Auseinandersetzungen um Betrug teil und auf welche Weise? In welchem Verhältnis stehen die sorgenden und strafenden Elemente des Sozialstaats? Wie verbinden sich dabei Migrations- und Sozialpolitik? Inwiefern kann die Analyse der Auseinandersetzungen um Soziahilfebetrug zum Verständnis aktueller autoritärer und nationalistischer Transformationen beitragen?
09.07. “Multimodality, Activation, Intervention: Experiments in Design Anthropology”, Andrew Gilbert, Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle
Design anthropology is best understood less as a settled subfield, and more as a space of encounter between design ways of thinking + doing and anthropological ways of thinking + doing. This talk will illustrate the potential of such an encounter through a discussion of the “multimodal turn” in anthropology, and a focus on the forms of activation and intervention that this turn enables. In particular, it will draw upon diverse and experimental research projects—including a collaborative graphic ethnography sited in Bosnia and an initiative to create multi-sited research infrastructure through a network of ethnography labs across North America—to identify points of connection and mutual influence between design and anthropology. These include the special role both see for collaboration, and how both entail concept work and incorporate reflexivity into their praxis.