World Anthropology with an Accent: The Discipline in Germany since the 1970s

Anthropology and development in Germany

“…However, the fact that many anthropologists in Nazi Germany also advocated for practical relevancefor example in the search for Lebensraum in the East (Hauschild, 1995;Streck, 2000) led to a fierce backlash after 1945. German academic anthropologists virtually completely abandoned the present in the societies they studied, as well as references to their own society (Gingrich, 2005;Haller, 2012;Bierschenk et al, 2016), as impressively demonstrated in the interviews Dieter Haller conducted with representatives of this generation. 2 Against the backdrop of National Socialism, it seems not too farfetched to understand this rejection as an attempt to escape all political entanglements.…”

“…In other words, the Bielefeld research and teaching programme represented an offer of modernisation to German anthropology, which the latter rejected for many years. In the 2000s, after the founding of the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle in 1999, with a British social anthropologist (Chris Hann) and a "Bielefelder" (Günther Schlee) as founding directors, it became widely accepted in German anthropology (Bierschenk et al, 2016).…”

Repairing the law: The search for justice in the Nigerien gendarmerie

“…With this, I try to do what anthropologists may do best (e.g. Bierschenk et al, 2015: 12–13): propose a change in perspective. In that sense, it is not the application of the law that is deficient, as metaphorically expressed in ‘under-enforcement’, but the law itself.…”