Tim Burger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Before taking on the position in 2025, he held teaching and research positions at the University of Göttingen and LMU Munich. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and studied in London (LSE) and Munich (LMU).
Tim Burger’s research focuses on economic practices, agriculture, environment, and value. He currently works on a book manuscript provisionally titled Losing the Land: Agriculture and Abandonment in the Azores which brings an environmental approach to the study of rural abandonment. Based on his doctoral fieldwork in a depopulated village, it tells the story of Azorean islanders who live out their consciousness of decline by engaging with agrarian land that is known to lie in ruins. His new project examines the social conditions and moral conceptions of tobacco farming among Indonesian smallholders. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, it asks how wealth and gender are navigated in the context of cultivating a crop perceived as profitable yet morally ambiguous.
Tim Burger is the author of articles and book chapters on themes like class formation, historicity, and human-animal relations published in journals such as American Ethnologist, Social Analysis and Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. He also co-edited collections on feminist approaches to the study of capitalism (Boasblogs, 2023), on the role of literature in the ethnographic imagination (Edition Trickster, 2024), and on field methodology (Transcript, 2024).
2025 “Vigilant Emigrants: Transatlantic Mobility and Class Formation between California and the Azores.” Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale 33 (3): 1-17.
2025 “Horticulture as History Making: Dense Action on Lost Land among Azorean Smallholders.” American Ethnologist 52 (2): 195-207.
2024 Inspirationen: Über die Entstehung ethnologischen Denkens. Wuppertal: Edition Trickster im Peter Hammer Verlag. (Edited Book, with Lisa Burger and David Sumerauer)
2023 „Men Who Shout at Goats: Agrarian Cultivation and Gendered Slaughter on an Azorean Island.”Social Analysis 67 (2): 1-22.
2023 Researching Capitalism: For a Feminist Approach to the Study of Capitalism / Für einen Feministischen Ansatz zur Erforschung des Kapitalismus. Boasblogs. (Edited blog series; with Gabriela Cabaña and Juliane Müller)
2023 “Money in an Actant World: Comparative Notes on Currency, Agency and Sociality.” Sociologus 73 (1): 1-20.
