Summer Semester 2025

Organizer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib

Topic: Academic Presentation

Time and Place: Every Tuesday from 10:30 – 12:00, from April 29  to  June 3, 2025, SDAC Seminar Room

By Paul Hobbs-Koch, Language Center, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: SDAC Guest Lectures (SDAC Seminar Room). The CAS Colloquium happens on Tuesday 18:00 – 20:00 c.t., weekly.

Synopsis:

Lecturer: Wen “Alvin” Wang, M.A.

Time and Place: Tue. 12:00 – 14:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

What are the dynamics of present-day Chinese society in the 21st century, and where do they come from? What is “China” and what can “being Chinese” mean today? This course explores the internal complexities and dynamics of the Chinese social world. It will mainly focus on the ongoing transformations and challenges in the circumstances of the predominantly Han Chinese society in the People’s Republic of China, and examine the common historical and political trends which have contributed in shaping present-day trends. Calling into question the notion of a cultural discourse concerning Chinese national character, it will emphasize instead the political and economic choices which contributed to produce the current situation.

Lecturer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib

Time and Place: Wed. 08:00 – 10:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

This course discusses foundational assumptions, core themes, and potentials of Psychological Anthropology. It considers why Psychological Anthropology has thrived in US anthropology but seems marginalized elsewhere. Potential reasons explored include an anti-psychologizing disciplinary ethos, the role of early psychological anthropologists in nationalist and colonial agendas, and a lack of postcolonial theory. The course then takes the recent emergence of psychological anthropologies outside the US as an opportunity to reflect on current debates. It elaborates on approaches concerned with power asymmetries and universalizing “Western” psychologies. Contemporary psychological anthropology fosters insights into new forms of inequality, violence, and human subjectivity. Hence, imposing psychological or bio-psychiatric “insights” on human experience is open to question. This creates productive tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of humanity that can be addressed ethnographically. The course also highlights significant work rejecting universalizing tendencies in psychology. It prefers illuminating historically, politically, and socio-culturally situated concepts of self, personhood, affect, sociality, health and well-being.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Mallika Shakya

Time and Place: Wed. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

This course is designed to introduce students to the concepts and tools necessary for critical engagement within the study of work and labour. We approach the world of work and labour with a view that it encompasses all productive arrangements people have with one another and with nature, and that their individual and collective identities are deeply rooted in the work that they do to make a living. We envisage labour not only as constituents of class and/or occupational status – as has been done routinely in mainstream labour studies – but as an identity-marker that shapes everyday lives of the people being studied. This course takes the view that domains of work and labour are entwined with broader social (and political) stratification that govern the lives of individuals, communities, societies and nations.

The course will begin by familiarising students with three mainstream approaches: (i) anthropology of work; (ii) labour relations and resistance; (iii) post/non-industrial labour. It will then invite students to problematize the overlaps between work and identity while analysing social, racial and national groundings of people who “work”. It is also important for students to be aware of reifications and biases associated with “studying down” where work is often equated to blue collar work, and is dismissively referred to as “labour”. This course invites students to consider all forms of work as potential fields of study and analysis. A key set of classics is covered to familiarise the students with the ongoing discourse(s) in anthropology of labour, labour history and workers’ movements.

By the end of this course, students will acquire knowledge on key concepts such as “class” and “social embedding of work”, and through the class assignments included in the course, they will develop competencies on research methodologies including shop floor ethnography, organizational ethnography and trade union studies. Issues of intersectionality such as race, caste, gender and nationality will be at the core of the readings and assignments built in this course. Due attention will be given to non-industrial and post-industrial work including concepts such as emotional work, creative work, etc.

Lecturer: Jessica Wengel, M.A.

Time and Place: Wed. 14:00 – 16:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Mallika Shakya

Time and Place: Thu. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

Within the broader realm of economic anthropology, this course will focus on the intersection of money and society. The course will build on the rich ethnographic literature that is available on reciprocal and redistributive aspects of money in addition to the hegemonic discourse on money as capital and a medium for exchange.  The subdomain of money will be discussed in the broader domains of economy, and consider the ideational differences between capitalism and the alternative schools of thought.

This course provokes students to consider that the words “money” and “capital” are not synonymous although that is how it is often implied within the worldview perpetuated by capitalism. What are the fundamental aspects of money? How was or is money situated in the pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies, and how are we to comprehend aspects of morality, ethics and stratification in relation to money? What are different functions of money beyond its primary function as capital (or profit-making) even within capitalist societies? This course takes the view that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to develop a holistic understanding on money. The focus of Section I of this course will be on reciprocal and redistributive elements of social structures where money has important roles to play. A puritanical economic approach to monetary analysis might be useful but it is not sufficient. This course will build on the classical and contemporary readings on economic anthropology to critically engage with the history of money and capitalism.

The Section II will turn to contemporary practice. Through a set of contemporary ethnographies from around the world, it will examine how human beings “insert themselves” into the organisations of finance, industry and trade even though these are often expressed in anonymised language of demand and supply. The course will pay close attention to ethnographies of corporate and financial organizations including the Wall Street and multinational corporations to trace the latest developments in the usage of money within capitalism. Students will be encouraged to think critically about new forms and systems of money in the current times and see how the core anthropological concerns about related to human nature – including memory, morality and social stratification – can be studied when analysing modern usage of money.

Lecturer: Dr. Maria Bondes

Time and Place: Mon. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

This course introduces students to the complexities, dynamics and processes of environmental governance. Drawing on the policy process model, students will learn to investigate and evaluate environmental policy making and implementation. Taking China as an example, we will have a closer look at China’s top-down system of environmental governance and discuss the pros and cons of such “environmental authoritarianism.” The course will approach these issues through the reading of relevant academic literature, in-class group exercises and discussion rounds. Moreover, students will be able to increase their methodological knowledge in the fields of policy analysis and case studies. Students will be organized in groups and conduct their own policy analysis of environmental governance in a specific issue field and region of choice. These case studies will be developed throughout the course and be presented at the end of the semester. The final examination is a term paper-format policy analysis based on the developed case studies.

Lecturer: Wen “Alvin” Wang, M.A.

Time and Place: Thu. 14:00 – 16:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: Blockseminar, dates: TBA, SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

This intensive course will have three components. First, the study of classic or lesser-known ethnographic texts that show how ethnographers enter their fields and begin their research. Second, the creation and testing of personal ethnographic projects and the conduct of concrete ethnographic exercises, with particular emphasis on participant observation, field exchange and/or interviews, and the role of description in ethnographic texts. Third, a reflexive analysis on the role of the ethnographer/researcher and on the ethical consequences of the choices we make in the production and analysis of research data. The course will include outside sessions meant as opportunities to experience and practice research.

Lecturer: PD Dr. Viola Thimm (she/her) & Prof. Dr. Giovanni Maltese

Time and Place: Block seminar, dates: Monday 28.4.2025, 18:00-20:00; Friday & Saturday 4.-5.7.2025, 9:00-18:00. Place: Lehrstuhl für Interkulturelle Theologie, Jordanweg 2, 91054 Erlangen.

Synopsis:

The concept of “culture” has radically been put into question by many anthropologists and among some representatives of neighboring disciplines. Similarly, the concept of “religion” has been questioned in religious studies. Many categorically oppose the application of “culture” – or other categorizing and homogenizing terms and ideas such as religion, ethnicity, gender – especially the plural forms such as “cultures” or “religions” – as an analytic category. This critique has been influential since the 1980s, when the “writing culture debate” unfolded and began to inform various follow-up discussions in the following years. Among the most prominent examples was L. Abu-Lughod’s (1991) plea for “writing against cultures”. As a first step, this course introduces students to some anthropological and religious studies critiques and enables them to develop their own informed argumentation on whether speaking of “culture(s)” or “religion(s)” should or should not be sustained. As a second step, the course delves into the interrelated problem of representation, i.e. the (im-)possibility of speaking and writing adequately about human beings, cultural and religious “Others”, and other “cultures” and “religions”. Finally, the course will turn to the question of comparison. After reviewing its trajectory dating back to the colonial era, when what colonial scholars imagined as “cultures” where dubiously mapped, measured and in effect produced, we will discuss why early post-colonial anthropology largely gave up comparative research, and on which grounds attempts have been made since the early 2000s to rehabilitate comparison in more nuanced and less epistemologically violent ways.

Besides discussing these issues through academic texts in the block seminar sessions, students are also required to individually visit three lectures at CAS-E and write critical reflections about how “culture” and “religion” are directly or indirectly used and understood in these lectures.

Lecturer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib

Time and Place: Blockseminar, SDAC Seminar Room. The course will be structured into three to four block seminars, each lasting about six hours on selected Fridays throughout the semester. The exact schedule will be explained in the first session on April 25th.

Synopsis:

This course examines the possibilities and challenges of engaged anthropological practice, foregrounding the intersections of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and scholar-activism. Moving beyond anthropology as an extractive knowledge project, we explore how researchers work with, rather than merely study, communities, institutions, and movements. Drawing on critical debates in race, environmental, and disability justice, we consider how public anthropology intervenes in structures of power and inequity. Special attention is given to art as an epistemic site, expanding anthropology’s methodological and expressive repertoire. Participants will develop a collective research proposal that reflects on the ethical, political, and epistemological stakes of public engagement, asking: What does it mean to think and act publicly as anthropologists? How might anthropology’s conceptual tools be reoriented toward transformative collaboration? Through these questions, the course invites a rethinking of anthropological knowledge production as an entangled, situated, and accountable practice.

To participate in the course, students must attend the first meeting (online) on Friday, April 25th, from 10:15 AM to 11:45 noon via Zoom: https://fau.zoom-x.de/j/65179435988.

Lecturer: Dr. Maria Bondes

Time and Place: Mon. 08:00 – 10:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

The transnational linkages that are tying together countries and societies around the globe –via trade, capital, information and people flows – are frequently captured with the buzz word “globalization.” However, what this term really means often remains rather fuzzy. In this course, students will be introduced to the concept of “globalization” and the main debates surrounding the phenomenon from an academic global studies perspective. Part 1 of the course will discuss how we can capture and study “globalization,” including its manifestation at the local level and in different world regions (“glocalization”). We will also look at the main perspectives on and ideologies about globalization (“globalisms”) that guide public and academic debates – market globalism, justice globalism, religious globalism and antiglobalist nationalism. In Part 2 of the course, we will get an overview of the different dimensions of globalization – economic, political, ecological and cultural. While each of these dimensions merits a class of its own, this course will focus on understanding the major debates related to each dimension. To deepen our understanding of these debates, we will apply the different perspectives on globalization from Part 1 to specific topics. In debate sessions, students will represent different “globalisms” and debate specific issues from these standpoints.

By taking this class, students will learn to approach “globalization” in an academic and systematic manner from a global studies perspective, understand and identify the underlying ideologies that guide academic and public debates about globalization and related issues, and gain the tools to investigate the manifestations of globalization in different issue fields and world regions. Moreover, students will be able to train their communication and debating skills. The examination method of this course is a 20 minute oral exam.

Lecturer: PD Dr. Viola Thimm (she/her)

Time and Place: Tue. 08:00 – 10:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room, first session: 29.04.25.

Synopsis:

This course wants to bring the subaltern and marginalized as key into social anthropological scholarship, with its discursive focus on moments of rebellion and struggle, to encourage an interrogation into the discipline’s own taken for granted analytic frames. The subaltern perspective is the perspective of those who are socially, politically, or geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure. As social anthropologist Veena Das notes, their perspective provides “an invitation to think anew the relationship between history and anthropology from a point of view that displaces the central position of the European anthropologists or historian as the subject of the discourse, and the [local] society as its object.” This is a critical claim for “decolonization” in scholarship which not only de-centred elite Western perspectives on non-Western societies but equally challenged local elite views which denied history, culture and agency of the more marginalized social groups.

In this course, the subaltern will be at the centre of attention with a view to maritime Southeast Asia. We will follow the idea of the subaltern as subjects in the making of their own histories and on subaltern consciousness and agency to make a plea for a democratization of history. In Malaya, the Communist Party and Guerrilla fought against British colonialism and Japanese fascism in the 1940s and played a crucial role in leading the country to independence in the late 1950s. In Singapore, strong student and trade union movements in the 1960s fought for their rights and were destroyed by state repression shortly after. A large student movement in Indonesia brought down the Suharto regime in 1998. Native people in Malaysia (orang asli) are currently fighting the local government for land rights and to protect their spiritual connection to the environment. Muslim feminist group Sisters in Islam claims an equal position of women on the basis of the Qur’an in the same country. Queer activists and their allies navigate through repressive times throughout the region. Bringing these and other examples together through literature studies and lectures by activists in the classroom, we seek to explore the struggles of the subaltern in order to understand the everyday life of the “common people” in the sense of a “history from below” and a “contemporary from below”.

Lecturer: Dr. Maryam Abbasi

Time and Place: Tue. 14:00 – 16:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

This advanced seminar investigates the theories and practices of occult sciences within the Islamic context, focusing on the diverse rituals and cultural traditions present in contemporary Islamic societies. Through an in-depth analysis of texts, practices, and rituals, students will explore key questions such as: What is the occult, and how does Islam view occult sciences? What are some examples of occult practices in contemporary Islamic societies? What role do these practices play in the social and personal lives of individuals, and how are they intertwined with Islamic beliefs and traditions?

• No prior knowledge of the subject is required.
• Students are expected to review the assigned readings prior to each seminar session.
• The course will also incorporate multimedia materials, including photographs, films, and music, to enrich the learning experience.

Lecturer: PD Dr. Viola Thimm (she/her)

Time and Place: Tue. 16:00 – 18:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room, first session: 29.04.25.

Synopsis:

In this course, we will examine issues and perspectives important to the Anthropology of Gender or Feminist Anthropology. We will deal with the development of feminist anthropology, with special attention to significant theories, themes of study, and debates within the field. Topics related to gender and sexuality that we will focus on include social constructions of gender, gender hierarchies, politics of the body, gender in its intersections with race, class and sexuality, and kinship and family. We will furthermore deal with feminist ethnographic writing strategies and with (taboos of) embodied fieldwork. We will focus on gender and women in heterosexual social relationships and on non-normative and non-binary genders and sexualities, analyzing central feminist works in anthropology from the 1920s to the present.

We will focus simultaneously on two kinds of directions: 1) what we know and what we don’t know, what we can and what we can’t learn about women, men, and non-normative genders, and the ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” in different cultural contexts, and 2) how anthropologists develop and use their methods and theories to learn about gender variation, and how politics influence this process. Rather than studying a collection of “facts” about gender across cultural contexts, in this class students will learn how to bring a feminist anthropological approach to topics related to sex, gender and sexuality, and to critically consider how categories and hierarchies of gender and identity are constructed in and through cultural norms about sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, indigeneity, nationality, and more.

Lecturer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib

Time and Place: Wed. 12:00 – 14:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

This course is intended for students with interest on the sociocultural study of multiple genders and sexualities in Asian contexts. It explores how vernacular forms of sexual and gender pluralism shape personhoods and lived-experiences that are differentially subjected to hegemonic orders of oppression within, across and beyond the region. It maps out how the dynamics of gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by colonial, postcolonial and decolonial entanglements. In this course we will also discuss how gender and sexuality in Asian regions have been ethically and epistemologically engaged with through academic practice; the ways they are problematised through sameness and difference in public discourse; how they are faced by moral policing and political contestations; and the processes in which they become sources of individual and collective agency.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: Thu. 16:00 – 18:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

How people “love” and choose their partners are since long highly controversial issues. How love and marriage should be attached together has been a major intellectual concern in the modernization process in Europe and elsewhere since at least the 19th century. For long, free-choice marriage based on romantic love were considered as a sign of progress and modernity. Social, cultural and political controversies often arise concerning mate-choice, who is entitled to choose, the rights of parents or of the community to interfere, but as well the age at which marriage can be pronounced, or who can marry whom, on the base of gender, religion, nationality, etc. Today’s numerous debates concerning online dating, but also alternative experimental forms of relationships like polyamory, or the choice to remain single, generate as many controversies as ever. In this class, we will come back to the theoretical and practical questions that the discourses and practices of “love” entail, and question how to appreciate and analyze the continuous transformation of the “love” question. For this, we will alternately focus on theoretical texts and on ethnographic research carried out in multiple human societies. Students will be welcome to come with their own research interests and study cases into this class.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: Wed. 16:00 – 18:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

Synopsis:

Morality remains the great question of human life. How do we split the good from the bad, how do we associate with others, and how do we make these decisions? The study of moral phenomena is a core issue for the understanding of how society and culture work. What is the role of ethics in human life? How do people deal with their moral sentiments in complex situations, and how can we distinguish individual moral sentiments from collective and socially-induced moral representations? But moral phenomena goes beyond questions of distinguishing the good from the evil. It includes all dimensions of life concerned with beliefs, symbols, and how we tie ourselves together. This research colloquium will work on the study of moral phenomena from an anthropological perspective. Based on the discussion of early or recent publications, as well as presentations of on-going research, it will particularly focus on the personal and collective dimensions of moral phenomena by examining the social dimensions of individual personality.

The colloquium is conceived as a space of exchange on ongoing research. It is reserved to second-year MA students working on their dissertation and opened to all researchers with an interest in the issue. In order zoo register, please write to jean-baptiste.pettier@fau.de

Lecturer: Malgorzata Marciniak, M.A.

Time and Place: Thu. 12:00 – 14:00 c.t., SDAC Lecture Room

Synopsis:

This weekly workshop is the continuation of last semester’s A1 course. It’s specifically designed for English-speaking students who want to advance their basic German language skills in academic contexts. Participants will have the opportunity to acquire basic German language for their day-to-day life as well as learn vocabulary and structures needed in academic environments. The course content includes: Introduction to fundamental and more advanced grammar rules and sentence structures of the German language, development of a solid vocabulary, practical exercises to improve listening and reading comprehension and speaking. At the end of the semester, participants will have the opportunity to take an exam that certifies them a A2 language level.

Lecturer: Sabrina Heilmann, M.A.

Time and Place: Mon. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., Seminar Room (Glückstr. 10), LS für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie

Synopsis: