The following list of the past projects of the Institute of Social Anthropology is sorted according to their respective date of closure.
E. Knoll is part of an international team of scholars under the directorship of Professor Gwyn Campbell of McGill University. That team has been awarded a partnership grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) entitled Appraising Risk, Past and Present: Interrogating Historical Data to Enhance Understanding of Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World (https://www.appraisingrisk.com).
The team investigates six periods of historical and contemporary environmental (e.g. climate change, volcanism, monsoons, cyclones, drought) and human (e.g. famine, disease, conflict, migration) crisis, in order to elucidate past-to-present patterns that will help inform current and future risk preparedness and responses to environmental crises and disaster.
As a member of Research Team 5 ‘Health and Disease’ under Team Lead and Africa specialist Issac Luginaah (University Western Ontario) E. Knoll studies the entanglements and interdependencies of human and environmental crisis in selected islands and shoreline countries of central and eastern parts of the Indian Ocean.
Research questions pursued will include: What environmental events underpinned epidemics and endemic disease? What were the origin, duration, and immediate physical impact of epidemics and endemic disease? What were the long-term environmental, socio-economic and political impacts? To what degree were such impacts felt on a cross-regional scale? How did humans perceive disease and epidemic outbreaks and how did they respond?
Team 5 focusses on the contemporary period (2001-17) out of the partnership’s six investigative periods spanning from 535 to 2017. Methodologically Team 5 draws on ethnographic fieldwork and literature studies accompanied by targeted archival studies into earlier periods of disease history.
This research project results from and it will be carried out within the 19 May, 2017 MoU between the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, CA and the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Forscherin:
Eva-Maria Knoll
Projektlaufzeit:
01.04.2018 – 31.03.2025
Finanzierung:
SSHRC, ÖAW
Principal Investigator:
Stephan Kloos
Duration:
May 2025 - December 2025
Financing:
DDr. Franz-Josef-Mayer-Gunthof Wissenschafts- und Forschungsstiftung
The aim of this project is to investigate the configuration of health equity in remote islands of the Maldives by focusing on inherited anemia. Within the last decade, the prognosis for thalassaemia patients in the Maldives has begun to change from a fatal pediatric diagnosis into a care-intensive chronic condition. The risk of giving birth to a child homozygous for thalassaemia has become somewhat predictable and avoidable. In short, genetic destiny has become linked to genetic responsibility.
Genetic responsibility (Novas & Rose 2000) in treatment and prevention, however, still is unevenly observed across the archipelago. Despite hosting one third of the population, the capital island Male’ shows a far lower proportion of new thalassaemia major births. Urban patients are more adherent to their treatment schedule and thus are generally in better health. Beyond the capital, two thirds of the local population live in scattered, small island communities in what patients and clients often experience as a more or less remote health periphery. Remoteness, however, is never just a plain geographical fact (Ardener 2012). This project scrutinizes remoteness with regard to genetic responsibility as a relational outcome of geography, genes and human agency.
By 2019 the investigation had developed into a comparative endeavor. The project compares high- prevalence regions in Asia with central Europe where the hemoglobinopathies thalassaemia and sickle cell disease rank as rare diseases and are on the rise, being linked to intensified migration from endemic regions. The project examines how genetic responsibility and remoteness are interrelated in different locales, how this tension is spatially, institutionally and socially anchored, and how different actors aim in theoretical and practical terms at improving the respective situation of (island or migration-related) therapeutic remoteness.
Project Leader:
Eva-Maria Knoll
Duration:
01.01.2018-31.12.2025
Financing:
Philipp Politzer Endowment, ÖAW
Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, Yemen has been witnessing tumultuous phases of transition. Revolutions, coups, intermittent episodes of unrest and violence, and the spread of various forms of extremisms seem to be turning many old certainties upside down, while the outcomes remain unknown. Scholars concerned with modern Yemen have often paid more attention to immediate temporalities than to their historic roots and constants. In addition, a narrowing of the focus of research on conflict, security, and (forced) migration issues can be observed (Bonnefoy 2018). Indeed Yemen is a troubled country in transition, but it remains influenced by and dependent on its traditional society, values and environment. The consideration of long-term constants and developments is often more helpful than the appeal to immediate causal factors and phenomena. In other words, considering Yemen’s multiple pasts and historical legacies is essential for understanding the factors which gave rise to its conflicted present.
The project “Postcolonial Approaches to Memory, Continuity, and Change in Southwest Arabia” aims at exploring possible avenues of research into long-term processes of changing living conditions and the multiple social, religious, political, and ecological transformation processes underlying it. The special focus is not on the discourses and narratives of political, religious or economic elites but on the everyday worlds, cultures and lifestyles of groups that have been excluded from the centers of power and all too often neglected by historiography and research. The project thus resonates with postcolonial scholarship, for it privileges the views and voices of people and groups who are denied an official voice. It is committed to the writing of these alternative histories “from below”, in particular those of South Arabia’s subaltern groups and local communities who make up South Arabia’a people “without history” (in Eric Wolf’s celebrated term): women, peasants, minorities, underprivileged groups including artisans (muzayyinūn), slaves and their descendants (akhdām), refugees, dissidents, and tribal and Bedouin groups at the margins of the South Arabian state(s).
Following ethnographic traditions, the research privileges bottom-up approaches and the triangulation of fieldwork (in situ and digital) with archival work and literature review. The focus is explicitly on emic sources, perspectives and discourses, i.e. the exploration and critical assessment of indigenous Yemeni sources and the abundance of Yemeni scholarship that has become accessible through digitization in recent years. Moreover, because of its emphasis on daily life and the everyday cultures of marginalized groups, the project examines possibilities of opening up avenues of research through the exploration of material culture(s). Material culture constitutes an integral feature of the shaping of everyday experiences and practices of those people and groups who are usually absent from historical documents. The project is largely exploratory and aims at providing the scholarly framework for the elaboration of further project proposals.
Project leader:
Marieke Brandt
Duration:
January 2023 - December 2024
Financing:
Core-funding
In their past, the Kurds have faced many hardships, ranging from the denial of their ethnic identity and their hopes of building a nation state, to violations of their human rights, severe acts of punishment, as well as persecution, forced migration, deportation, and acts of genocide and ethnocide. All these are crucial aspects for the shaping of Kurdish history, self-awareness identity processes and belonging. This project aims to explore memory-building processes in the Kurdish transnation, which includes the Kurds in the different nation states of their homelands, as well as Kurdish diasporic and transnational communities. The dynamics of both remembering and forgetting the past will be investigated in an innovative manner.
The hypothesis of this project is that today’s experience of the past in the Kurdish transnation has not only been shaped by the different kinds of political exclusions, persecutions and human rights violations that the Kurds have experienced, but also by intra-ethnic cultural diversity, internal power relations, and their integration into different states. Due to new communication technologies, it seems that new ways of dealing with the past are in the making, resulting in various impacts on the Kurdish transnation in general and on individuals in particular. The project will explore the differences, commonalities and dynamics of memory-building in the Kurdish homelands and diasporas, which not only involve strategies of coping with the past but are interlinked with identity-building processes in general. It is the aim of the project to trace the ways that remembering and forgetting have developed using a descriptive, a phenomenological, and a comparative approach. The project explores the long-term effects of mass violence in Kurdish society, in its inter-generational relations, and in intra- and inter-ethnic processes. The application of anthropological methods helps to examine these effects in both the original and subsequent generations, and to achieve new insights into how violent experiences are coped with. A comparative approach enables a view of the general direction of the long-term impact of these events on this society. Three cases have been chosen for the investigation: the persecution of the Yezidi Kurds during WWI, the mass atrocities against the Alevi Kurds in Dersim 1937/38, and the Anfal Operations (1988/89) against the Kurds in Iraq. The focus on different sub-groups and time-frames enables the analysis of memory-building processes in different temporalities, territorial settings in political discourses and social frameworks. The application of multiple methodological approaches, namely, intensive archive studies, multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, and comparisons within and between trans-national spaces, will shed new light on the dynamics and strategies of modes of remembrance, as well as the intersections in and interrelatedness between memoryscapes in multiple modernities.
Project leader:
Maria Six-Hohenbalken
Duration:
01.05.2013 - 31.12.2025
Financing:
Elise Richter Projekt (FWF), JESH, core-funding
The purpose of this research is to explore the construction of ‘ethnicities’ in the context of the old city of Jerusalem/al-Quds. Specifically in the Muslim Quarter, where the Palestinian African community -al-Jāliya al-ʾafriqiya\ al-Jāliya - currently reside among the wider Palestinian community of Jerusalem and several minority groups i.e al-Nuri. Through conducting ethnographic field research mainly in the old city, I aim to analyse the ethnic group; in terms of the construction of ethnic identities and boundaries, in its association with national identities, as well as the cultural fluxes within the group and across generations. Accordingly, this research mainly aims to answer how the Palestinian African community is constructed in the Islamic quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. Unavoidably, such a study has to include comparative methodological dimensions, which also include local ethnic minorities’ relations with the local regional (Arab-Islamic) majority as well as regarding Israel’s presence.
Project Leader:
Noura Salah Aldeen
Duration:
19.12.2020-31.01.2025
PhD Supervisor:
Andre Gingrich
Financing:
ÖAW DOC Stipendium
This project developed from the Austrian Science Fund project “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia” (FWF P26645-G22; 1.6.2014-31.12.2018) that generated an anthropological account of Indonesian Muslims’ religious life as it is embedded in the everyday uses of social media and communication technologies. “Social Media and Islamic Practice” focuses on the consequences of these developments in the field of religion in Indonesia. It is particularly concerned with Muslims’ uses of social media to position themselves within the field of Indonesian Islam and to imagine their place within the broader Islamic world. The project understands social media as a contested space where different ideologies and visions, informed by offline geographies and geopolitics, can collide. It puts emphasis on the visual representation of piety and examines how class positions, gender orders and multiple possibilities of being public and private are reflected in these online expressions. Moreover, the project discusses a variety of social media practices that mirror a digital divide among Indonesian Muslims, and asks whether today’s extensive religious uses of social media reinforce class differences among Indonesian Muslims, and thus a kind of Islamic digital divide, or whether one can also spot trends that point in the opposite direction. The projects also examines the consequences that the uses of social media have for Islamic charities in Indonesia. It is interested in how these charities use social media to document their activities and to raise funds, and how the discourse of almsgiving has changed. Reflecting on the temporal logic of acceleration that increasingly informs the field of social welfare in Indonesia today, it analyses the role of social media in carrying out a quick, unbureaucratic conversion of donations into concrete help as well as notions of immediate material and spiritual return that inform the practice of donors. Furthermore, the project engages with analytical challenges that concern the categorization of Indonesian Muslims in scholarly as well as public discourses. It seeks to question established categories and the ways they have been used so far in light of the growing popularity of Islamic socialities that have a strong online component and that display a remarkable ideological diversity.
Project leader:
Martin Slama
Duration:
1.1.2019-31.12.2024
Financing:
core-funding
This project, which is still in an early stage of its development, is concerned with an urban Southeast Asian phenomenon that one can describe as the production of empty spaces: warehouses, apartment towers, hotels, housing estates etc. have been built on an increasing scale, but at least some and sometimes many of them remain empty due to speculation, legal issues, economic crises etc. These empty or partly empty buildings bear witness to the uneven distribution of living space in Southeast Asian cities in light of the fact that in the lower-class kampung space is extremely limited and has to be shared by a large part of the population. The project asks how this empty (but for most people unachievable) space is charged with meaning by Southeast Asians of different class backgrounds, which leads the project to consider religious phenomena such as rituals that are held to cleanse living space from evil spirits that are said to haunt the buildings. In insular Southeast Asia, Islamic and other, less orthodox spiritual authorities usually deal with such phenomena that fuel the religious economies in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The project is thus interested in how the real-estate economy generates a particular religious economy that is informed by ideological struggles in the religious field at large. Furthermore, the project engages with the notion of emptiness (kekosongan in Indonesian/Malay) and with a rich research tradition on certain Southeast Asian values and sensibilities that are, for example, expressed in the binary opposition of positively valued business/crowdedness/noisiness (ramai) and negatively valued non-business/quietness/loneliness (sepi). Theoretically, the project connects with anthropological re-readings of Weberian and Marxian approaches that link religious and economic phenomena. Locating religious phenomena in one of the most booming sectors of the economy, it aims to go beyond the often recycled and criticized “disenchantment” and “false consciousness” theses by exploring this research tradition from new, unexpected angles.
Project leader:
Martin Slama
Duration:
1.6.2019-31.12.2024
Financing:
core-funding
This project builds on a long scholarly engagement with the Hadhrami diaspora in Indonesia that has also resulted in the habilitation thesis of the project leader (see CV) as well as on the Austrian Science Fund project “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia” (FWF P26645-G22; 1.6.2014-31.12.2018). The project attempts to locate Hadhrami models of Islamic authority within a changing landscape of Islamic proselytization in Indonesia that is highly informed by the utilization of a variety of media. It asks how Hadhrami models have become adapted to these developments and to which extent Hadhrami preachers had to reposition themselves to secure their place in Indonesia’s increasingly diverse Islamic field. The project is particularly interested in Hadhrami preachers who regularly use social media in order to be able to compete with a growing number of celebrity preachers that emphasize media-savviness over classic Islamic education and noble trans-regional genealogies that Hadhrami preachers possess. In this climate of competition, the project is concerned with the role of Hadhramis’ diasporic identity in constructing authority, not only in Indonesia’s religious, but also in its political field, in which Indonesians of Hadhrami descent occupy leading positions. It asks in which circumstances and constellations diasporic identity is emphasized, downplayed or omitted, and when religious and political authority is combined, disentangled or kept apart from the beginning. Furthermore, the project examines a particular religious orientation of parts of the Hadhrami population in Indonesia, namely of those who are active in Islamic reformist movements. It aims at tracing the specific trajectory of a reformist ideology among Indonesian Hadhramis, and asks to what extent their notion of reform differs, for example, from the ones advocated by reform movements of the Javanese Muslim majority population. In this respect, it focuses on how intra-diasporic relations and relations to the homeland change with the advent of reformist thought.
Project leader:
Martin Slama
Duration:
1.4.2019-31.12.2024
Financing:
core-funding
Context and aims
Although a growing body of academic literature documents the historical trajectories and contemporary dynamics of Asian medical traditions, few studies have observed in ‘real-time’ the early stages of the integration of such a tradition into state structures. Despite a global shift towards more heterodox approaches to healthcare, many important questions about such integration processes remain unanswered. Integrating Traditional Medicine seeks to fill this gap by examining the reconfiguration of Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) in India following its official recognition in 2010, and specifically by focusing on relationships between state bodies and Sowa Rigpa institutions.
Research questions
How does a formerly marginalized medical tradition gain official legitimacy and become integrated into state structures?
What interactions are taking place between representatives of Sowa Rigpa and branches of the Indian state?
How are integration processes understood, experienced and reacted to by differently positioned practitioners and groups?
Approach and Methods
The research questions will be approached via three distinct yet interlinked domains of enquiry: the association, the clinic and the pharmacy. These correspond to major fields in which Sowa Rigpa is interacting with the Indian state as integration processes play out. Data will be gathered using anthropology’s signature methodology of ethnographic fieldwork. The researchers will spend extended periods of time at key Sowa Rigpa institutions and with a broad range of individual practitioners and pharmacists, engaging in participant observation, interviews and events. Due to ongoing Covid-related restrictions and to the fast-moving nature of the topic, field research will be combined with ‘digital ethnography’ methods, using social media to follow developments and gather reactions to them throughout the project period.
Project team
Dr. Calum Blaikie is the Project Leader and will focus primarily on developments taking place in Ladakh, notably at the National Institute for Sowa Rigpa and Central Institute for Buddhist Studies. As a contributing researcher, Dr. Stephan Kloos will focus on Tibetan exile institutions in India, notably the Men-Tsee-Khang and Central Council for Tibetan Medicine based in Dharamsala. Dr. Chithprabha Kudlu joins the team as a post-doctoral researcher and will work mainly with Indian governmental bodies, such as the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa and Homeopathy (AYUSH).
Originality and innovation
This project is uniquely positioned to follow integration processes as they actually unfold in real time, as well as to document the experiences and reactions of a broad cross-section of practitioners, institutional staff and state actors to the developments underway. The project will make an innovative, relevant, timely and comparative contribution to the anthropological literature concerning Asian medical traditions, while contributing empirically and theoretically to wider debates concerning governance, policy processes, minority-state relations, marginality and social change. It thus holds strong potential to produce results that will resonate across the social sciences and in a variety of applied fields.
Project Leader:
Calum Blaikie
Duration:
01.09.2021 - 31.12.2024
Financing:
FWF (P 34010-G) - Stand-Alone project
Walter Dostal (1928-2011) was a full professor at the University of Vienna, a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and one of the most influential representatives of German-speaking social and cultural anthropology in the second half of the 20th century. During his extensive field trips in the Middle East from the 1960s to the 1990s (North and South Yemen, Oman, Southwest Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, Anatolia), he collected a vast collection of visual materials, which are now housed at ISA.
Walter Dostal’s scientific legacy consists of around 70,000 images (photos, slides), in addition to film material, audio recordings, maps, and drawings that are of exceptional value to researchers, the heritage conservation sector, and the interested public. The South Arabia-related visual material (about 22,000 images from former North and South Yemen and adjacent areas in Saudi Arabia and Oman) forms a unique ethnographic documentation of South Arabian everyday lifes, crafts, rituals, material cultures, and traditional architectures from the 1960s to the 1990s. As Yemeni culture and heritage are now threatened by war, poverty, and climate change, UNESCO recognizes the protection and documentation of all forms of Yemen's cultural heritage as particularly urgent.
The digitization and scientific exploration of Dostal’s extensive visual legacy is a long-term project. As part of the Kulturerbe Digital initiative, in a first step the project aims to digitize and publish 5,000 selected South Arabia-related visuals, along with their technical and scientific metadata, in Open Access via Academy-CATalogPlus and the Europeana. The digital preservation and publication of this part of Dostal’s visuals related to South Arabia is made possible by funding from the Austrian Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service, and Sports in the framework of the Austrian Development and Resilience Plan, and is financed from EU funds as part of the Europeana Initiative.
Project leader:
Marieke Brandt
Collaborators:
Mehmet Emir, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Eva Stockinger, Eszter Hárs, Marina Stoilova, Verena Baldwin, Merlin Alkuin Hochmeier
Financing:
Funding programme Kulturerbe Digital of the Austrian Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sports
Europeana Initiative of the European Union
Webseite:
https://kulturpool.at/inhalte/walter-dostal-nachlass
This long-term project was established in 2009 and investigates methodological and epistemological foundations of current socio-cultural anthropology within its transnational contexts of globalization. This includes explorations in the history and in current diversities of ethnographic fieldwork, elaborations in anthropological comparison as well contributions to re-assessing crucial concepts in our fields (e.g. on diversity, civilization, multiple history) and how they relate to an engaged, epistemological pluralism.
See, e.g. the contribution in Lowe and Schnegg, eds., Comparing Cultures, coming soon.
Project leader:
Andre Gingrich
Duration:
01.01.2009 - 31.12.2024
Since the 1993 reinstallment of the monarchy after the devastating rule of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation, foreign NGOs have been mushrooming in Cambodia. Several among these are charities that are based in Malaysia and the Arabian Gulf, and which have become the core of Muslim transnational networks that intersect in the country. These charities invested vast resources in order to reconstruct the Cambodian Muslim religious infrastructure and leadership, that had been almost completely wiped out during the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, they spread their own religious ideas and discourses among the country’s Muslim minorities. This research will inquire into how transnational Muslim networks and charities based in the Middle East and Malaysia have transformed the religious identity, leadership and infrastructure of Cambodia’s Muslim minorities. It will look into the evolution of the Gulf and Malaysian charities in the country, the patterns of the existing competition between them, and how the transnational flows and the transformation of the Islamic field altered the structure of gender relations among Cambodian Muslims. Perhaps the largest Islamic movement in Cambodia, Jama‘at al-Tabligh became one of the most important carriers of the coronavirus in the country, due to their early dismissal of social distancing, which led to mistrust and discrimination of Muslims among the majority, and intense internal debates among the Muslims themselves. Therefore, the project will also observe the ongoing transformations in the Muslim minority due to Covid-19, and will pay attention to the different discourses in the community regarding carrying out religious obligations in times of a pandemic. The chief method of data collection will be ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cambodia, Malaysia and Kuwait.
Project leader:
Zoltan Pall
Supervisor:
Martin Slama
Duration:
1.2.2020-31.12.2023
Financing:
Marie Curie Fellowship until 02.02.2022, afterwards ÖAW
The project collects and explores narrations, images and imaginations, fragments and artistic expressions along old and new Steppe and Silk Roads, which link dispersed and connected biographies, artistic traditions, cultural monuments and memories. These fragments will be joined in exhibitions and a concomitant scientific-artistic fieldwork notebook.
Hereby, fast processes of transformation as a result of establishing new roads will be juxtaposed to slow narrations and memories of individuals as well as historic artefacts and fresh artistic works developed within the project. This research therefore opens a space to individual and artistic voices in response to current and future determining emerging global-economic projects and plans. The artists and scientists (social- and cultural anthropologists, musicologists and archaeologists) of the core project team document and collect fragments of expressions developed by formulating specific questions on themes such as mobility, nomadism, memory, cultural and knowledge transfers along the roads to create an artistic project cartography for the joint exhibitions and publication. The artistic works include photographs, videos, film, poems, songs and music, and drawings as different narration lines. Museum artefacts will be links or starting points for these forms of narrations – which show the fragmented and yet interwoven sidelines and branches of existing and emerging roads, which transform the landscapes like an expanding uncontrolled nervous system. Artists from i.e. Mongolia and Usbekistan will be invited to create new works which will be integrated into the museum exhibitions. A new multi-layered collection – seen through the eyes of the other – will be added to and enliven the historic ethnographic collections.
Exhibitions
„Steppen & Seidenstraßen/ Steppe & Silk Roads“ at the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg (03.12.2020-07.11.2022) and „Staub & Seide / Silk & Dust“ at Weltmuseum Wien (15.12.2021-03.05.2022)
„Staub und Seide. Alte Routen – neue Perspektiven entlang der Seidenstrassen“ at Völkerkundemuseum vPST Heidelberg (17.05.2023–17.01.2024)
Nomin Bold & Baatarzorig Batjargal
„MULTIVERSE“ at Völkerkundemuseum vPST Heidelberg (17.05.2023–14.09.2023)
Projektleitung:
Maria-Katharina Lang
Projektmitarbeiter:
Tsetentsolmon Baatarnaran (ÖAW), Johannes Heuer, Erdenebold Lhagvasuren (Mongolian University of Science and Technology), Lucia Mennel, Tatia Skhirtladze (University of Applied Arts Vienna), Christian Sturminger
Kooperationen:
Weltmuseum Wien, Museum am Rothenbaum Hamburg (MARKK), Museum für Völkerkunde VPST Heidelberg, National University of Mongolia (NUM), Mongolian University of Science and Technology, Mongolian State University of Arts and Culture, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Inner Mongolian State University
Projektlaufzeit:
01.07.2017 - 31.12.2023
Finanzierung:
FWF (PEEK/ AR 394-G24), ÖAW
Webseite:
https://dispersedandconnected.net/
For decades individuals and families in Palestine have been confronted with an occupation that deprived them of their basic humanitarian rights. In spite of the stagnation in most areas to change these political and military conditions, Palestinian society has begun to develop alternative means of counter-culture. The present project focuses on the role of humor in art within the discourse of resistance that has proliferated in Palestine. It explores through an anthropological lens, the social-political and cultural dynamics behind these forms of resistance in Palestine, and their underlying motives, by analyzing selected key examples of humorous art.
Project leader:
Noura Kamal
Duration:
1.11.2019-31.10.2023
Financing:
FWF (P 32362-G) - Stand-Alone project
This project will investigate how mobilities take shape in conjunction with environmental crisis following the earthquake of September 2018 in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia and its aftermath.
Disasters are anything but “natural”; instead, they emerge from the historical relations and processes among humans and environments. This project is not the story of a disaster, but rather the earthquake and its aftermath will serve as a focusing event to explore the complex interrelations of life and landscapes in the region across time. It will investigate plural framings (cultural, religious, technocratic, environmental, etc.) of these events by inquiring about mobilities of people, things and ideas in relation to the environment. For instance, the settlement patterns in the region actually moved away from the coast and the Palu-Koro fault region, while colonial power dictated precisely that these areas were to be worked and populated. Mangroves protect shorelines from waves and erosions. As they disappear, the project asks what kind of relations to this ecosystem can be found.
The research will look at who moves and who stays after a disaster. How does the influx of goods and capital during the humanitarian response affect power asymmetries and gender dynamics? Where do particular ideas of risk come from and what local trajectories do they take on?
Socio-environmental frictions are the contact zones where, for instance, people interact with a body of water in a new way or where state authorities regulate what species of trees to protect. In this sense, the project will continue the work of social scientists proposing ways to analytically go beyond the culture-nature divide. A central aim of this project is to generate an anthropological account of a growing public discussion linking climate change, environmental degradation, disasters and human mobility.
PhD-Project:
Daniela Paredes Grijalva
Supervisor:
Martin Slama
Duration:
1.2.2020-31.1.2023
Financing:
AAS DOC
Within the project two transdisciplinary workshops will be organised in Ulaanbaatar at the University for Arts and Culture and in Vienna at the Weltmuseum Wien to discuss and exchange experiences of artistic-scientific collaborative work. Furthermore, the aim of the workshops is to elaborate on concepts and drafts for artistic-scientific projects, which later also should form an integral part of future exhibitions. With these workshops we intend to start respectively to continue innovative artistic-scientific processes and dialogues between Ulaanbaatar and Vienna and beyond. The outcome of the project will be the production of a peer-reviewed scientific article and the development of concepts for future projects and exhibitions.
Cooperations:
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of the National University of Mongolia, School of Fine Art and Graphic Design of the Mongolian National University of Arts and Culture
Project leader:
Maria-Katharina Lang
Collaborators:
Tsetsentsolmon Baatarnaran (National University of Mongolia)
Duration:
31.12.2021 - 31.12.2022
Financing:
Eurasia Pacific Uninet/OEAD, ÖAW
Building crafts emerge from the ongoing interaction between relatively stable local knowledge, skills and materials, and more dynamic external influences. This project focuses on the processes and effects involved in the contemporary transformation of building crafts in Himalayan vernacular architecture, where such traditions still predominate but where they are undergoing a period of accelerating change and decline. A wide range of dynamic natural and anthropogenic conditions (such as material resources, climate, and socio-economic factors) give rise to various patterns of adaptation. Focusing on carefully selected regions with strong local building craft traditions, this project explores these transformations and their drivers at the level of building structures, techniques and materials, as well as the social frameworks within which construction takes place and meaning is assigned to the built environment.
Project leader:
Hubert Feiglstorfer
Collaborators:
Calum Blaikie, Tsering Drongshar
Duration:
01.07.2020 – 30.11.2022
Financing:
Innovationsfonds „Forschung, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft“, ÖAW
Dieses historisch-anthropologische Langzeitprojekt umfasst die Bearbeitung von Archivmaterialien und unveröffentlichten Forschungsergebnissen. Wissenschaftler in der Habsburger Monarchie zeigten besonderes Interesse an den Entwicklungen im Osten des Osmanischen Reiches. Expeditionen wurden in die Region gesandt, um umfangreiche Forschungen durchzuführen, Handelsdelegierte wurden stationiert, um die ökonomischen Beziehungen zu festigen und nicht zuletzt wurden militärische Einheiten der Habsburger Monarchie in den von Kurden bewohnten Regionen stationiert. Dies erfolgte aufgrund des militärischen Bündnisses von Österreich-Ungarn, dem Deutschen Reich und dem Osmanischen Reich während des 1. Weltkrieges.
Die systematische Bearbeitung der Archivmaterialien soll neue Erkenntnisse über ethnonationale Bewegungen und inter-ethnische Beziehungen zwischen der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis nach dem 1. Weltkrieg ermöglichen.
In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts haben sich mehrere österreichische Wissenschaftlern auch mit kurdenspezifischen Themen beschäftigt, diesbezüglich sind v.a die Sprachwissenschafter M. Bittner und A.H. Barb zu nennen. Deren Einzelforschungen haben zur Entwicklung der Kurdologie als Wissenschaft beigetragen. In einem Subprojekt sollen diese Beiträge gesammelt, ausgewertet und der internationalen Wissensgemeinschaft zugänglich gemacht werden.
Project leader:
Maria Six-Hohenbalken
Duration:
01.09.2007 - 31.12.2022
Financing:
core-funding
Thanks to increasing investment in infrastructure in the Economic Quadrangle formed by China, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, regional integration and transnational trade are currently developing at a fast pace in a region targeted as an integral part of the China-promoted ‘Belt and Road Initiative.’ These changes and apertures are provoking in turn an unprecedented transformation of cultures and livelihoods among populations in the area, a transformation characterized by expectations of economic improvement on the part of previously marginalized groups, as well as by renewed processes of exclusion and dispossession.
In order to understand how these developments affect the position of women and gendered economic relations in general in the Upper Mekong region, this project focuses on the interplay between religious, economic, and gender discourses and practices among the Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna (Ch.: Xishuangbanna), a small border prefecture in Yunnan Province of China. In the last decades, this locality has become an important tourist destination in Yunnan Province, and is at present one of the fastest-developing areas in the region. This, together with the rich multi-ethnic character of the prefecture, makes it a perfect site to investigate social change in the borderlands where China meets Southeast Asia. Through its focus on a very specific geographical area, the study addresses issues of general theoretical significance regarding the transformative effects of modernity and market economy among minority groups and rural communities. Within this framework, the project will also investigate the impact on the borderlands where China meets Southeast Asia of the recent COVID19 outbreak, understood as yet another transforming force involved in the contemporary shaping of a cultural and ecological context in constant change.
The project is a Austria-Japan cooperation co-funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). Dr. Roger Casas leads the Austrian side of the project from ISA, while Prof. Kumiko Kato (Nagoya University) is the Principal Investigator in the Japan research team. The project also involves Dr. Aranya Siriphon (Chiang Mai University, Thailand) as collaborator. Finally, Yu Wanjiao, a PhD candidate from Sipsong Panna, is currently working at ISA within the framework of the project. With the title ‘Tai Lue businesswomen and shifting gender relations in China’s southwest frontier,’ her research aims at understanding how the new economy may be facilitating or hindering access to the local public sphere for Tai Lue women in Sipsong Panna, and the ways in which this process may be affecting gender relations among the group, in a context where the crisis of Buddhist monasticism is threatening traditional avenues of social mobility and prestige of local men.
Project leader:
Roger Casas
Collaborators:
Yu Wanjiao (PhD Candidate), Aranya Siriphon (Lecturer, Chiang Mai University, Thailand)
Cooperations:
Chiang Mai University (Thailand), Yunnan University (Kunming)
Duration:
01.08.2019 - 15.09.2022
Financing:
FWF (I 4260-G), AAS
The beginning of the construction of burial mounds in Tibet can be dated at least to the 4th C. AD and it ends in the early 10th C. when after the collapse of the Tibetan Empire (ca. 600-850) the royal graves were plundered. The starting point for the present research programme is the data from recent ethnographic fieldworks in Central Tibet; on the one hand this relates to the results of visits to dozens of cemeteries by the project leader in the past few years, on the other hand to the planned surveys of 40 to 50 more grave fields, whose existence has already been established by means of modern satellite imagery. This unique new evidence of the pre-Buddhist history of the Tibetan Highlands is largely unknown to the research, and it is therefore a prime target first to document it in the form of a detailed description as well as a photographic, graphic and cartographic illustration. The investigation will also include a first (Western) archaeological survey of the tumuli of Central Tibet, related to the area of landscape archaeology. Together with the relevant textual sources and the archaeological data available today, these empirical recordings ultimately form the basis for a historical and anthropological study of these monuments and their context of ritual, clan and empire. The studies also take into account the perspectives of other disciplines (architecture, art history, geography) as well as modern techniques of documentary processing of the data. Beyond its contribution to the history of early Tibet, the research will be relevant for regional comparison within the cultural space of Central Eurasia, and will inter alia provide significant new comparative data on “barbarian religion” and the anthropology of mortuary rituals.
Project leader:
Guntram Hazod
Collaborator(s):
Hubert Feiglstorfer, Martin Gamon, Jürgen Schörflinger
Cooperations:
Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences, Lhasa;
Institute für Indologie und Zentralasienwissenschaften, Universität Leipzig;
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute für Archäologische Prospektio und Virtuelle Archäologie, Wien.
Duration:
01.10.2017 - 30.09.2022
Financing:
FWF
Völkerkunde zur NS-Zeit aus Wien (1938–1945): Institutionen, Biographien und Praktiken in Netzwerken
Andre GINGRICH, Peter ROHRBACHER (Hg.)
Serial: Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse, Band: 913
Serial: Veröffentlichungen zur Sozialanthropologie, Band: 27/1,2,3
Publisher: VÖAW
ISBN13: 978-3-7001-8619-9
Diese dreibändige Publikation mit 1739 Seiten und 42 Beiträgen widmet sich der Stellung der Völkerkunde aus Wien während der NS-Zeit, im Exil und im „Dritten Reich“. Im Fokus stehen institutionelle und biographische Netzwerke sowie ideengeschichtliche Aspekte. Dies bringt akademische Fachgeschichte vor dem Hintergrund der generellen sozio-politischen Zeitgeschichte im damaligen zentraleuropäischen, aber eben auch im internationalen Kontext, systematisch zur Darstellung. Das Spektrum umfasst dabei nicht nur die zentrale Völkerkunde/Ethnologie, sondern auch wichtige Nachbarfächer von Physischer Anthropologie über Ur- und Frühgeschichte bis hin zu Volkskunde, Afrikanistik und Japanologie. Wesentliche Fragestellungen des Bandes sind ausgerichtet auf die Art von Forschungen der Völkerkunde in und aus Wien und auf deren Wechselbezüge zur jeweiligen Politik. Beleuchtet wird damit zum einen das Ausmaß der Beteiligungen an verbrecherischen Aktivitäten zur NS-Zeit, zum anderen inwieweit das Fach in Aktivitäten des Widerstands gegen das NS-Regime eingebunden war. Besonderes Augenmerk wurde auf die Herausarbeitung feiner Nuancen innerhalb der manchmal fließenden Übergänge zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand gelegt. Für die Bearbeitung der Beiträge, an denen 28 Autor/inn/en mitwirkten, wurden insgesamt mehr als hundert verschiedene Archive in zehn Ländern genutzt. Publizierte oder selbst initiierte Interviews mit Zeitzeugen und Familien-Angehörigen ergänzten die Archivforschungen in einigen noch möglichen Fällen. Der Dreibänder bietet auch einen aussagekräftigen Index und mehr als 250 anschauliche Bildquellen, die der Öffentlichkeit zumeist erstmals zugänglich gemacht werden.
Andre Gingrich/Peter Rohrbacher
Völkerkunde zur NS-Zeit aus Wien: Einleitung der Herausgeber (p. 15-32)
Band I
Andre Gingrich
Viktor Christian und die Völkerkunde in Wien 1938–1945: Universität, Anthropologische Gesellschaft und Akademie der Wissenschaften (p. 373-424)
Andre Gingrich (mit Julia Gohm-Lezuo)
Rochaden der Völkerkunde: Hauptakteure und Verlauf eines Berufungsverfahrens nach dem „Anschluss“ (p. 425-448)
Band II
Peter Rohrbacher
„Verschollene Kulturzusammenhänge“: Der Altorientalist und Altamerikanist Friedrich Röck und seine Stellung in der NS-Zeit (p. 585-666)
Peter Rohrbacher
„Wissenschaftsförderung ohne Antrag“: Dominik Josef Wölfel und die Kanaren-Forschung 1938–1945 (p. 851-926)
Band III
Peter Rohrbacher
Zwischen NS-Regime und Ordenszensur: Martin Gusinde SVD und sein Verhältnis zum Nationalsozialismus 1938–1945 (p. 1113-1158)
Andre Gingrich
Völkerkundliche Geheim-Expertise und Lagerforschung: Die Wiener „Lehr- und Forschungsstätte für den Vorderen Orient“ im SS-„Ahnenerbe“ (p. 1217-1302)
Peter Rohrbacher
Pater Wilhelm Koppers’ Exilzeit 1938–1945 (p. 1489-1529)
Andre Gingrich
Konturen eines Frontwechsels: Christoph Fürer-Haimendorfs Wege vom NS-Sympathisanten zum britischen Regierungs-Ethnologen (p. 1583-1610)
Peter Rohrbacher
Pater Wilhelm Schmidt im Schweizer Exil: Ausgewählte Interaktionen mit Wehrmachtsdeserteuren und Nachrichtendiensten 1943–1945 (p. 1611-1642)
Projektleitung: Andre Gingrich und Peter Rohrbacher
Duration: - End 2022
Financing: Austrian Academy of Sciences
This research aims to investigate the Austro-Arab encounter, including both the established Arab population in Austria and the newly arrived refugees. It substitutes the common narrow foci on “community” studies and “integration” for a broader focus on the “encounter” between different worldviews and on the way this encounter connects Austria, Europe, and the Arab Middle East. The Austro-Arab encounter is here thus conceived both in terms of mutual representations and worldviews, and in terms of social relations. This way, this research proposes conceptualizing the broad panorama of the Austro-Arab encounter by: a) answering how both Arabs in Austria and non-Arab Austrians mobilize ideas such as nationhood, ethnicity, and religion to engage with one another, how they represent each other, and what they expect from the other; and b) by evaluating how relatively important is this encounter for each of these groups. This innovative perspective will generate a comprehensive understanding of the social situation analyzed, which in turn can shed light, for example, on the subjects themselves, new prospects for the Arab Middle East, and anthropological questions at large. Some of these anthropological questions are: a) the nexus between refugeeness, suspicion and trust; b) ritualization, sacralization, and embodiment of affects, dispositions, moods, and practices; c) the nexus between nationhood, ethnicity, and religion; d) physical mobility versus the refugee and often immigrant experience of immobility.
Project leader:
Leonardo Schiocchet
Collaborators:
Sabine Bauer-Amin
Duration:
01.07.2018 - 30.06.2022
Financing:
FWF / AAS
Offline and Online Forms of Sociality in the Technopolitan City of Bandung, Indonesia
This project aims at generating an anthropological account of pluralism as it is practiced and experienced in emerging online and offline socialities in the technology-driven city of Bandung, Indonesia.
It lends on a definition of pluralism as different ways of being in the world that are accorded legitimacy in the process of everyday practices and interaction. This definition goes beyond discursive engagements to account for pluralist sentiments and dispositions nurtured in the daily socialities of ethnically and religiously heterogeneous groups. Bandung, Indonesia’s center of technological development, demonstrates a multiplicity of lifestyles with social media prompting new spheres of cultural exchange that inform the perception and interpretation of diversity.
Central aim of this research is to assess how young tech-savvy Muslims in Indonesia deal with cultural and religious difference and to what extent new forms of connectivity bear pluralist sentiments and dispositions in an urban, majority Muslim and yet diverse society.
PhD-Project:
Dayana Lengauer
Supervisor:
Martin Slama
Duration:
01.09.2017-31.05.2022
Funding:
AAS DOC Fellowship
This COVID19 Rapid Response 2020 project is a cooperation between the Institute for Urban and Regional Research and the Institute for Social Anthropology. Both institutes bring in contacts with migrant organisations and many years of research expertise in the Syrian (ISA) and the Afghan community (ISR).
Refugees are among those most at risk by COVID-19. Already in the countries of origin before and during the flight, they were often in settings that can be described as a “state of emergency”. Again, they are now exposed to a state of emergency. "Social distancing" is the main strategy to avoid the risk of infection. How do refugees deal with this challenge? As beneficiaries of asylum or subsidiary protection, they often live in cramped living conditions. On the other hand, social networking within the groups of origin and with Austrian contact persons (e.g. friends, mentors, German teachers, employees of NGOs) is one of the most important integration strategies.
In the urgency of the current situation, the reactions of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan to the COVID-19 crisis and the diverse changes in all areas of life are researched. New structures are emerging in the communities, which are characterized by the integration of online communication (spiritual offers, support for everyday tasks, discussion forums). In addition, the current experience of refugee relief facilities is taken into account. The data collection is based on a mixed-method approach, which includes community-based participatory research (CBPR) elements and leads to a multi-step analysis.
Project team: Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Sabine Bauer-Amin, Ola Laila, Mohammed Nour Zena
Cooperation: Josef Kohlbacher, Marie Lehner (ISR)
Duration: 01.05.2020-30.06.2022
Financing: WWTF, ISA
In the late 10th century, during the period which became known in Tibet as the ‘Later Spread of Buddhism’ (bstan pa’i phyi dar), Buddhism was revived in Central Tibet and introduced into Western Tibet as a state religion. Closely following the proclamation of a Buddhist constitution by the ruler of Western Tibet in the form of two royal edicts (986 and 988), the foundation of four central Buddhist monasteries was begun, simultaneously in all cases in 996 in major areas of the West Tibetan kingdom. At the same time also in border areas of the kingdom, the construction of a number of Buddhist temples and monasteries started. Concomitant with these foundation processes, the social and economic order of the whole society was re-organised and rigorously structured according to Buddhist concepts.
In this project, based on work by the late Guge Tsering Gyalpo and in collaboration with Tsering Drongshar and Christiane Kalantari, various new textual, historical, and art-historical information relating to these early West Tibetan Buddhist monuments and their foundation by members of the royal West Tibetan lineage is examined from a social-anthropological perspective. This concerns, for example, two important historical textual sources authored by Guge Paṇḍita Drakpa Gyaltsen (1415-1486), the “Royal Genealogy of the Solar Lineage” (Nyi ma’i rigs kyi rgyal rabs) and the “Extended Biography of the Royal Lama Yeshe Ö” (lHa bla ma Ye shes ’od rnam thar rgyas pa). The foundation of the West Tibetan kingdom, its antecedents and an account of the royal lineage of West Tibet are some of the topics treated in the first text while the second is dedicated to the life and activities of perhaps the most important and influential person in the early history of Western Tibet, who according to all relevant sources was responsible for the Buddhist transformation of Western Tibet in the late 10th/early 11th century. New information is also studied and prepared for publication on the main temple of Nyarma (Ladakh), a stela in Kyuwang (Tsamda District, TAR, China) related to the Great Translator (lo chen) Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055) and the monumental stela in Chokro (lCog ro) (Purang District, TAR, China).
Project leader:
Christian Jahoda
Cooperations:
Tsering Drongshar, Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Documentation of Inner and South Asian Cultural History (CIRDIS), University of Vienna; Christiane Kalantari, ISA
Duration:
1.1.2019-31.03.2022
Financing:
core-funding, private foundations
