2016 - 2018

Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia

Project leade: Martin Slama
Collaborators: Dayana Lengauer
Duration: 01.06.2014-31.12.2018
Financing: FWF (Projekt: P26645-G22)
Website: Islamic Interfaces

The project “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia” aims at generating an anthropological account of Islamic religiosities in contemporary Indonesia as it is embedded in the everyday uses of social media and communication technologies.

Focusing on the largest Muslim majority country, the project is designed to contribute to the emerging anthropological literature on social media, contemporary religiosities, and developments within Indonesian Islam. The project attempts to explore new ground in these three fields by linking Islamic everyday piousness and regular religious gatherings to social media usage (such as Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp). Following the latest anthropological literature, the project understands the internet as a collection of interfaces among which social networking sites feature prominently, not least because they become increasingly integrated into people’s everyday lives. This is particularly true for Indonesian uses of social networking sites. These interfaces, as the name of the most popular site, i.e. Facebook, suggests, provide ample opportunities to exhibit visual and textual material, including people’s religious expressions. In the Indonesian context in particular, social networking interfaces have become sites where the country’s many “Islamic faces” are displayed – and it is these emerging forms of conveying and expressing Islam as well as the socialities that are generated in these intersecting online/offline realms this project attempts to study.

The project has a particular focus on the first generation of Indonesians that discovered the internet, i.e. when they were students in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as on Islamic preachers that are often part of this media-savvy generation. An investigation of their online and offline Islamic practices, their emerging socialities and forms of piety demands carrying out fieldwork in the major cities on Java which show a strong presence of users, such as Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bandung and Surabaya. By following their networks and their Islamic preachers the project extends to cities outside Java as well, such as Makassar and Manado as well as Palu and Ambon. Together with the major cities on Java they form one space of emerging socialities displaying particular expressions of Islamic piety in interlinked online/offline realms. These realms are explored in a joint effort of Austrian and Indonesian researchers by deploying a combination of offline and online qualitative methods.

Project leader:
Barbara Götsch

Duration:
21.8.2017 - 20.2.2018

Financing:
AAS / City of Vienna (MA7)

Im globalen Wettstreit der Städte erscheint der Begriff „Smart City“ als besonders attraktive Zuschreibung. Es handelt sich dabei um einen weitläufigen Überbegriff, der Eigenschaften wie hochtechnologisch, intelligent, vernetzt, innovativ, nachhaltig und partizipativ transportiert, und von verschiedenen Städten zu strategischen Zwecken unterschiedlich genutzt wird. Das Projekt „Smart city – smart citizens?“ beleuchtet was Wien bzw. Singapur jeweils unter „Smart City“ verstehen und wohin der Transformationsprozess jeweils führen soll. Insbesondere untersucht das Projekt wie Akteur/innen der Stadtplanung diesen Prozess im Hinblick auf die Bürger/innen vorantreiben: sowohl was Informations- und Entscheidungsprozesse betrifft als auch was Vorstellungen von den Kompetenzen von zukünftigen Bürger/innen betrifft.

Project leader: Eva-Maria Knoll
Duration: 01.10.2014-31.12.2017
Funding: core-funding

This medical-anthropological project investigates the organization and interaction of two forms of mobility listed by John Urry as essential in the contemporary globalized world.
Drawing on insights from mobility studies, island studies and ocean studies, mobility and connectivity are considered as creative reactions to restrictions, limitations and remoteness – the outstanding features of island communities.
The project is associated with the Max Planck Fellow Group "Connectivity in Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean" of MPI Fellow Burkhard Schnepel, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale).

Project leaders: Maria-Katharina Lang, Christian Jahoda
Consultants: Eva Allinger, Jorinde Ebert, Christiane Kalantari
Cooperations: SEECHAC (Société Européenne pour l'Étude des Civilisations de l'Himalaya et de l'Asie Centrale), Paris; Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale Giuseppe Tucci, Rome; National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences, Lhasa, PR China; University of Vienna
Project Duration: 06.01.2012-15.11.2017
Budget: AAS/ISA, SEECHAC, private foundations, Eurasia-Pacific Uninet

Based on preparatory work starting in January 2012, the third international SEECHAC colloquium took place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna from 25-27 November 2013. This conference brought together over 30 international scholars and researchers from a variety of disciplines and fields of study (beside social anthropology in particular archaeology, art history, numismatics, philology and study of religion) who presented their respective recent research on "Interaction in the Himalayas and Central Asia: processes of transfer, translation and transformation in art, archaeology, religion and polity from antiquity to the present day". Among the topics discussed at this interdisciplinary colloquium was direct or indirect cross-border relationships and the transfer and transformation of knowledge and specific cultural traditions as well as interrelationships across geographic, cultural and media borders (for example, painting, sculpture, ritual, text) and trans-religious dynamics in borderland regions.

A book publication with the results of the colloquium (co-edited by Eva Allinger, Frantz Grenet, Christian Jahoda, Maria-Katharina Lang and Anne Vergati) appeared in March 2017 (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press).

Project leader:: Maria-Katharina Lang

Collaborators: Tsetsentsolmon Baatarnaran (NUM), Erdenebold Lhagvasuren (Mongolian University of Science and Technology), Lucia Mennel, Christian Sturminger, Johannes Heuer
Cooperations: Weltmuseum Wien, National University of Mongolia (NUM), Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Bogd Khan Palace Museum, Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg, Völkerkundemuseum der J. & E. von Portheim Stiftung Heidelberg
Duration: 15.10.2013 - 31.07.2017 (Ausstellungen bis Ende 2018)
Financing: WWTF (Project SSH13-051) / AAS
Websites: www.nomadicartefacts.net, www.wwtf.at

The project follows and examines the movements of artefacts, in this case Mongolian ritual objects, through various spatial, socio-political and institutional contexts. The topography and the “knowledge” of these things are interwoven with cultural transfers between Europe and Asia, with Viennese and Mongolian science and museum history and practice, with the impacts of political suppression and democracy processes in Mongolia, and with modes of human-object interactions and the power of things.

The research started from a collection at the Weltmuseum Wien (WMW) in relation to public spaces in Mongolia such as museums, Buddhist monasteries, public altars and ritual places in the natural landscape as well as private spaces inside yurts. What transformations have these spaces undergone in periods of socio-political transition? The project will continues and intensifies the dialogue and transfer of knowledge between Mongolian and Austrian scientists and institutions: processes of transformation within the WMW here serve as a basis for comparison. Mongolian ethnographica collected at the turn of the 19th century by Hans Leder document the various strands of the objects’ history: the artefacts’ itineraries from public spaces such as public ritual altars in the natural landscape or from the sacred space inside yurts in Mongolia, their complicated transfer to the Viennese and other European ethnographic museums and their “lives” as museum objects. Through these movements their meanings have been changed and new relations and networks created. While similar and comparable objects in Mongolia were not “conserved” in European museums, they were handled differently there. During the purges in the late 1930s religious artefacts had at least to disappear from public space. A few monasteries were spared the destruction and transformed to public museums. The histories and transformations of these museums from their establishment to the present time are one local focus of research. With the transition to democracy and capitalist market oriented economy new museums have been created. Museum collections are sometimes regarded as “trésors”. But trésors of what? Of an ambivalent history, of modes of collecting, of the history of cultures, of fragile cultural encounters, or of a (lost) social life of things? Bearing these ambiguities in mind, the research intends to present frictions, transformations and transitions, assemblages, memories and the efficacy of things related to (ethnographic) museums and collectibles. Ways of dealing with and exhibiting ethnographic artefacts, including scientific and artistic methods of “moving” objects and perceptions, are elaborated and presented in multi-perspective ways.

Project Book: Nomadic Artefacts. A Scientific Artistic Travelogue edited by Maria-Katharina Lang, Austrian Academy Press, 2016

An interdisciplinary Survey in Medieval Western Europe and Southwest Arabia

Project leader: Andre Gingrich, Walter Pohl, Christina Lutter, Stephan Prochazka
Collaborators: Salvatore Liccardo, Odile Kommer, Andrea Nowak
Cooperations: Department of Oriental Studies at the University of Vienna, Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
Duration: 01.07.2014 - 30.06.2017
Financing: DOC-team Stipendium (AAS)
Associated Project: "Visions of Community. Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE)" (https://viscom.ac.at/)

By starting from central authors, this interdisciplinary team project aims at examining how ethnonyms matter for the manifestation of ethnicity in medieval contexts of Southwestern Arabia and Western Europe, and where major similarities and differences occur.

Project leader: Marieke Brandt
Duration: 01.11.2015 - 31.10.2021
Financing: ÖAW/New Frontiers Research Groups Programme

In recent years the large borderland regions between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, in particular the governorates of Ṣaʿdah and al-Jawf, have become a central crisis zone in today’s globalizing world. Since Yemeni unification in 1990, this zone became the scene of particularly complex and violent local, national and international power struggles informed by social, economic, political, and sectarian backgrounds. Through the involvement of the regional super powers Saudi Arabia and Iran, and eventually the U.S. drone war in Yemen, this formerly peripheral area has become the focus of international attention and security concerns. Having arisen largely unnoticed during the recent decades, these local conflicts have developed potentials with national and international impact, affecting stability and security in Yemen, the Middle East, Europe and the world community as a whole. In addition, without a profound historically, socially and politically informed analysis of recent and current developments in this area, a key moment of the “Arab Spring” movement and the emergence of new fault lines between Sunni and Shia denominations throughout the Near and Middle East would escape our understanding.
This project explores and explains the profound social, denominational, economic and political transformations in the provinces of Ṣaʿdah and al-Jawf during the recent decades by the means and tools of social anthropology and neighboring fields. Special consideration is given to the role of local actors in the implementation of broader political and sectarian programs and economic endeavors. The project builds on one of the oldest research traditions of the AAS - the exploration of South Arabia - which is linked to the famous names of Eduard Glaser, David H. Müller, Walter Dostal and Andre Gingrich.
Being based in Vienna, the project’s cooperation with internationally renowned experts from the universities of Princeton, London, Sydney, and Sana’a ensures its integration into the international research scene.

Project leader: Barbara Götsch
Duration: 01.03.2018 - 31.12.2021
Financing: ÖAW/Erstmittel, Poech Erbschaft

This project engages with the “aspirational” future visions promoted by cities and regions in Southeast Asia in their effort to attract investments, tourists and talents. Next to the landmark construction of futuristic high-rises, this competition entails the comprehensive restructuring of technical infrastructure as well as the aspiration to create ‘ecologies of expertise’ (Ong 2005) and more recently an emphasis on sustainability and conviviality. This project looks at the ways in which this is played out in particular in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. It critically reflects on the presentation of self and visions of the future of the cities of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Impulses, innovations, interactions and interdependence Vienna / Malé

Project leader: Eva-Maria Knoll
Duration: 01.03.2013-30.06.2017
Financing: mixed

Crucial impulses for the development of tourism in the Maldives since the 1970s were already laid in the late 1950s, when the Viennese Hans Hass explored the Maldivian lagoonswith his research vessel. Building on his first experience with the underwater world of the Old Danube lake, Hass became a pioneer of scuba diving, underwater photography and exploration of the underwater world. These impulses from Vienna's Danube beach aroused an interest in the underwater world in generations of holiday makers and contributed to shaping tourism on the Maldivian coral reefs. Following recent impulses arising from the stress caused to coral reefs by global warming, research has been carried out at the University of Vienna on restoration, renaturation and the creation of artificial reefs.
From a social anthropological perspective, this project examines the various human/nature interactions between the Maldivian coral reefs and landlocked Austria as a 'global assemblage' of human and non-human actors. The concept of the 'impulse' (from Latin impellere, 'strike, drive, induce') will thereby be refined in terms of an incentive.

Subproject-leaders: Abdullah Baabood, Andre Gingrich, Ali lshawi, Roxani Margariti, Daniel Varisco
Partner Institutions: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Qatar University, Emory University
Duration: 01.01.2016-01.05.2017
Financing: Quatar National Research Fund (QNRF)

This project will combine ethnographic fieldwork among elderly pearl divers, fishermen, boat captains, owners of dhows and their wives with analysis of the heritage recorded in textual sources.

The Austrian-Palestinian Encounter and its National and Religious Flows

Project leader: Leonardo Schiocchet
Duration: 01.05.2015-30.04.2017
Financing: Lise Meitner Grant (FWF)

The main axis of Palestinian fluxes in Europe was Germany in the 1960s and Scandinavia in the 1980s-1990s. However, since Chancellor Bruno Kreisky's era, Vienna has played a decisive role in fostering and supporting Palestinian civil society and a secular Palestinian nationalism. Despite the relative absence of academic research on the Austrian case, in the last 10 years the Palestinian community in Vienna has been officially represented or directly supported by many Palestinian-Austrian, Arab and Austrian institutions, and deeply tied to main Austrian political parties. However, religious institutions also aggregate Palestinians and reclaim the polyphonic concept "The Palestinian Cause". How do nationalism and religion flow through transnational Palestinian networks engaged in the Austrian-Palestinian encounter? Do these flows intersect and, if so, how? How does Europe, and particularly Vienna, influence the relation between these variables?

Researcher: Gantulga Munkh-Erdene
Supervisor: Maria Katharina-Lang
Duration: 15..10.2016-25.03.2017
Financing: Ernst Mach Grant (Eurasia-Pacific Uninet)

In Mongolia, following the mining boom, two phenomena have emerged. Those are: development or mega projects and cultural heritage issues. According to the Law of Cultural Heritage, if the companies or organizations want to use any land for economic activities those subjects have to reserve a research for protection and preservation of cultural heritage on the target area of their project. The research must be undertaken by academic or scholarly organizations or individuals. Following this process, several research questions have risen, such as: Is it a revival of traditional culture? What methods emerged concerning the protection process of the cultural heritage? What are the scholars’ activities and roles on this field? However, it is common to consider the revival of Mongolian cultural heritage in connection to the collapse of Soviet Union’s communist regime after being suppressed for over 70 years. Today, we are witnessing another round of similar discourse, which we call revitalization of cultural heritage. For Mongolia, a country with 25 years of democratic history experiencing western development policy, the conventional interpretation regarding oppression of and liberation from the Soviet regime is no longer valid to understand the politics of cultural heritage in Mongolia. Therefore, alternative interpretations are now necessary to comprehend current and further processes of cultural heritage. In this research, I try to explore the new explanation or the new trigger of cultural revival in Mongolia.

The pilgrimage to Mecca as an example for diversity and mobility

Project leader: Valeria Heuberger
Duration: 01.10.2015-31.12.2016
Financing: MA 7, Kultur-, Wissenschafts- und Forschungsförderung der Stadt Wien für 2013

The project deals with the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, hajj - which belongs to the pillars of Islam -, performed by Viennese Muslims. How about the organization of the pilgrimage and which role play Muslim associations for the handling of the trip to Mecca? In the project the time period from the second half of the 20th century until today will be covered. To methods used belong interviews with experts from Muslims associations and with Muslims before and after the hajj. Participant observation of preparatory courses organized by Muslim associations will be another tool as well as media screening of German and non-German, for example Turkish, print media providing information and reports about the trip to Mecca performed by Viennese Muslims.

PhD-project:: Tsetsentsolmon Baatarnaran
Supervisor: Maria Katharina-Lang
Duration: 15.02.2016-15.10.2016
Financing: Ernst Mach Grant (Eurasia-Pacific Uninet)

This study sets out to explore the concept of ‘national’ (ündesnii) or ‘traditional’ (ulamjlalt) Mongolian culture and art and its historical and contemporary transformation. It examines the context of a number of processes of cultural construction that took place in Mongolia in the socialist and post-socialist eras. This study focuses mainly on musical culture, but touches upon other genres of art including film, literature and the visual arts. My main approach is to take a critical stance towards the current concepts and categories in cultural production and to explore the processes they were constructed. Not limiting myself within a specific art genre, I discuss ethnographic examples relevant to my argument towards transformative impact of state policy. In each case I am concerned with processes of transformation in terms of the understandings and normative definitions of those categories in state policy, academic literature, and in public culture. In dealing with the concepts of socialism and post-socialism, I do not aim to characterize two clear-cut or monolithic categories. Rather, I try to explore the varied aspects, shifts, appropriations and manipulations of art and its politicization in both eras.

Young Egyptian Intellectuals between self-expressions and demands of their interests

PhD-project: Sabine Bauer
supervisor: Andre Gingrich
Duration: 24.04.2013-31.07.2016
Financing: ÖAW/DOC-Stipendium

The project wants to shed a light on the social and cultural impacts of the revolution and the following transformation phase on identity and alterity constructions of young Cairene students. The actors find themselves in difficult economic and political contexts with climbing food prices, chaotic public order breakdown major income sources This crisis allows space for new self-definitions, which are often formulated through creative usage of urban and digital space. Cairo's youth is witnessing new forms of agency within the social space. Using the concept of grammars of identity/alterity (Baumann/Gingrich 2004) the project aims to anylyse strategies and patterns of appropriation of urban and digital sites to express belonging and differentiation. Therefore the project combines recent debates on identity with urban and media studies, as well as the theory of affect.

Project leader: Maria Six-Hohenbalken
Duration: 01.07.2008-31.07.2016
Financing: core-funding

Der 2003 verstorbene Ethnologe Werner Finke hatte über zwei Jahrzehnte in der Türkei geforscht. Eine der weltweit größten Sammlungen kurdischer Ethnographica am österreichischen Museum für Völkerkunde geht auf ihn zurück. 2008 übergab seine Erbin Dr. Widhalm der ÖAW seine umfassende Foto- und Filmsammlung dem Institut für Sozialanthropologie der ÖAW. In unterschiedlichen Teilprojekten werden diese Materialien sukzessive aufbereitet und ausgewertet.

Project leader: Helmut Lukas
Collaborator(s): K. Hakami (KSA/Univ. Wien), P. Chindaritha, (BA/Thailand)
Duration: 01.01.2007 - 30.06.2016
Financing: ASEA UNINET / BMWFW

Nachdem im März/April 2009 eine erste Datenerhebung zum Raumkonzept sowie eine ergänzende Erhebung zum numerischen System der Maniq durchgeführt worden war, standen im August/ September 2010 Raumkonzept, Orientierung und Mobilität der Maniq, einer Sammler-Jäger-Ethnie im Süden Thailands, im Zentrum der Untersuchung. Aufgrund widriger Bedingungen konnten die Ziele dieser Pilot-Feldforschung (Sammeln von Basisdaten für ein FWF-Projekt) jedoch nicht in vollem Umfang erreicht werden. Mit dem Projektthema verbundene Workshop-Teilnahmen waren u.a.: „Space, Numerical Systems and Color Terminologies: Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Analysis" (Wien, 8.-9.10.2010) und "Hunter-gatherers and semantic categories: An interdisciplinary workshop on theory, method and documentation" (Neuwied, Deutschland, 30.5. - 4.6.2010).

Old Tales, Ancestors, and Ceremonies. Bronze Gongs of Guangxi in Ancient History and Present Time

Project leader: Helmut Lukas
Duration: 01.08.2007 -
Cooperations: Nationalities Research Institute of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region/GZAR, Nanning, PR China; Anthropology and Ethnology Research Inst. and Southeast Asia Research Inst., Guangxi University for Nationalities, Nanning, PR China; Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, PR China. In Austria: Museum of Ethnology Vienna (today: World Museum Vienna)
Financing: Eurasia-Pacific Uninet

The focus of this innovative and interdisciplinary project is the ritual use of bronze gongs in the mountain villages of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (GZAR) inhabited by several ethnic groups. In GZAR more than 1000 ancient Dongson bronze gongs were excavated, and even more ancient drums are used in rituals by many ethnies (Zhuang, Yao, Sui, Miao, Yi etc.) till today. Despite many cultural changes this ritual use of bronze gongs reveals a persistent cultural continuity and builds a bridge connecting the present generation with its ancestors. Nowhere else can be found such a big number of ancient gongs and nowhere are so many gongs still in use. This remarkable fact appears to have escaped the notice of social anthropologists, since up to now there was no research done on this topic. In the past, the bronze gongs of the Non-Han tribes of S-China still resisting Han authority were a central symbol of political power. Consequently, the Chinese conquerors tried to capture them and to convert them into symbols of Han domination. Till this day the bronze gongs fulfil various social and religious functions. New trends: Bronze gong festivals ordered and arranged by the local governments. The ritual use of bronze gongs seems to play more and more a decisive role in emphasizing the ethnic identity amongst an amazingly multi-ethnic society. On account of their historical and cultural importance, the bronze gong motif is deliberately used as "logo" for GZAR.

In 2002 Lukas visited GZAR and documented a Zhuang ritual (in which the frog-goddess is at the center). He published an article on this topic in the same year. In a 2nd field stay in 2008 Lukas visited Guangxi and Yunnan and collected additional data on the ritual use of bronze gongs. Based on these investigations Lukas together with his partners in China developed a concept for an anthropological research project. In 2015 a research project on Franz Heger was initiated. Project title: „Franz Heger (1853-1931) – Eine Rückbesinnung. Weltstadt Wien im internationalen Wissenschaftskontext" („Franz Heger (1853-1931) – A reconsideration/reexamination. The cosmopolitan city of Vienna within the context of the international scientific community"

PhD-project: Barbara Götsch
Supervisor: Andre Gingrich
Duration: 1.11.2010 – 29.02.2016
Financing: Dissertationsprogramm der phil. hist. Kl. der ÖAW

This interdisciplinary project explores questions of basic human sociality. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork with an NGO-team in Rabat, Morocco. The focus of attention is on the practice of cooperation on the team, looking at communication, conflict and cognition (“theory of mind”) against the background of the current cultural and political environment.