Two scientists at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) were successful in the latest round of research awards from the European Research Council (ERC): Judith Bovensiepen and Ariane Sadjed.
ANIMATED NATURE VERSUS EXTRACTIVISM?
Judith Bovensiepen, the new Director of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has been awarded one of the two ERC Consolidator Grants and will devote the next five years to the study of animism and extractivism in Southeast Asia. Within the logic of the Western capitalist worldview, nature - animals, plants, landscapes, water or air - is something that we can own, destroy or protect. For many indigenous cultures, however, plants, animals and things are considered to be animated.
These animistic cosmologies prevent indigenous communities from viewing the environment as a resource to be exploited. But to what extent can it protect against extractivism, i.e. the exploitation and export of raw materials by multinational companies? Instead of pitting indigenous communities against the extractive industry, Bovensiepen uses ethnographic research in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste to investigate how the extraction of natural resources influences people's various relationships with the environment and how this relationship with nature is constituted through interactions.
JEWISH LIFE IN THE PERSIAN REGION
Who are the Persian Jews and what can we learn from their history? Looking back on almost 3,000 years of history, the majority of them left the Persian-speaking world in the middle of the 20th century. Over the next five years, Ariane Sadjed from the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences will be investigating the complexities of coexistence between Jews and Muslims in Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan.
Using family histories, archive material and oral history, the cultural scientist will examine contacts within and outside Jewish communities in everyday life in order to shed light on the various forms of connection with and demarcation from the surrounding Muslim societies - and thus show how Jews contributed to the societies in which they lived. It is the first comprehensive study to analyse the history of Persian-speaking Jews not along today's national borders, but instead focuses on the trans-regional networks that were actively present until the 1930s.
ERC Grants at OeAW
ERC Grants are the most prestigious and highly competitive research funding programmes of the European Union. ERC Consolidator Grants support excellent researchers at an early or mid-career stage in consolidating their scientific independence. The grants are endowed with up to 2 million euros for a period of 5 years. The two new Consolidator Grants bring the total number of ERC grants awarded to OeAW researchers since 2007 to 77 ERC Grants and 7 Proof of Concept Grants. The Academy was significantly involved in a further 18 ERC Grants.
