Crisis and Anthropology - Detailseite

This seminar explores crisis as both a topic of ethnographic research and a way of understanding contemporary social and political change, including economic breakdown, humanitarian intervention, environmental disaster, and political upheaval.

Organized into three thematic blocks, the course begins with ethnographic case studies that examine how different communities, experts, and anthropologists experience and respond to crisis in everyday life. These cases are situated within broader historical and political processes such as imperialism, capitalism, and authoritarianism.

The second block introduces crisis as an analytical concept, focusing on questions of time, rupture, repetition, and chronic or overlapping crises. Building on this approach, the final block explores alternative ways of thinking about social and political transformation beyond crisis.

Through close reading, discussion, collaborative work, and selected multimedia materials, students move from concrete ethnographic analysis to theoretical comparison and critique, gaining the tools to critically assess dominant narratives of crisis and to develop alternative frameworks for understanding social and political transformation within or beyond crisis.

Bryant, Rebecca. 2016. ‘On Critical Times: Return, Repetition, and the Uncanny Present’. History and Anthropology 27 (1): 19–31.

Carpi, Estella. 2023. The Politics of Crisis-Making: Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Fassin, Didier and Honneth, Axel. 2022. Crisis Under Critique: How People Assess, Transform and Respond to Critical Situations. (eds) New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Hage, Ghassan. 2009. ‘Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality’. In Waiting, 97–106. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing.

Han, Clara. 2012. Life in Debt: Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2006. “Crisis.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2): 357–400.

Mbembe, Achille and Roitman, Janet.1995. ‘Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.’ Public Culture 7: 323-352.

Ramsay, Georgina. 2020. ‘Time and the Other in Crisis: How Anthropology Makes Its Displaced Object.’ Anthropological Theory 0 (0): 1-29.

Vigh, Henrik. 2008. ‘Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline.’ Ethnos 73 (1): 5–24.

Alle in Studienordnung vorgesehenen Prüfungsformate werden angeboten.

Prüfungen werden in beiden Prüfungszeiträumen abgenommen.