Anthropology in Motion: 4 Encounters with current trajectories of scholarship from Austria(The RAI Country Series)

Anthropology in Austria has come a long way, in terms of achieving diversity, growth and international visibility, since first emerging in Vienna, the capital of the former Habsburg Empire, and now of one of its main successor countries. This volume combines elements of critical self-reflection about that academic past with confidence in the intellectual currents presently in motion across the discipline. As with the country’s contributions to world literature and music, the trajectory of social-cultural anthropology may be seen as a good example of the global relevance of research in Austria within the humanities and social sciences. This ‘anthropology in motion’ situates itself at the intersections between contemporary and historical research, but also often between the natural and the social sciences. It shows a commitment to conceptual and theoretical pluralism, but, equally importantly, a dedication to the maintenance and improvement of standards of methodological quality. Whether empirical research is focused on studies at home or abroad, the blending of renewed forms of ethnographic fieldwork with solid comparative analyses and archival research characterizes many of these ongoing advances.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 – Advances, transitions and other forms of motion: Introducing the trajectories of anthropology in Austria (Andre Gingrich); Chapter 2 – Revaluation processes: Urban restructuring, war and dispossessed histories in a border city (Ayşe Cağlar); Chapter 3 – Remote connections: Human entanglements with built and natural environments in the Arctic and elsewhere (Peter Schweitzer); Chapter 4 – In motion: Genes, identities and mediated lives in dispersed small-scale contexts (Eva-Maria Knoll); Chapter 5 – Persistent universals in biennial research: A perspective from the Biennale de Dakar (Thomas Fillitz); Chapter 6 – From Buddhist deities to the spirit of capitalism: Tibetan medicine and the remaking of Inner Asia (Stephan Kloos); Chapter 7 – Mnemotopes and memoryscapes in a transnation: The commemorations of extreme violent experiences in Kurdish and Yezidi society (Maria Six-Hohenbalken); Chapter 8 – Riddles of the past: Historical anthropology and the history of anthropology (Andre Gingrich); Chapter 9 – The heirs of ethnologia: The missing homeland and three imperial suburbs (Chris Hann); Chapter 10 – Comment: An anthropology of the land (Joao de Pina-Cabral); Contributors; Index.

About the Author :
Andre Gingrich (Editor) is a Founding Member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and a member of the Royal Swedish and the Austrian Academies of Sciences, where (until 2019) he served as Founding Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA). Ayse Çağlar (Contributor) is a University Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna. Thomas Fillitz (Contributor) served as Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna until autumn 2018. Chris Hann (Contributor) is Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Honorary Fellow of the Hungarian Ethnological Society. Stephan Kloos (Contributor) is a Senior Researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Social Anthropology and its Acting Director (since 2019). Eva-Maria Knoll (Contributor) is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. João de Pina-Cabral (Contributor) is Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Portugal) and Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent (UK). Peter Schweitzer (Contributor) is Professor and Deputy Chair at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna and Professor Emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Maria Six-Hohenbalken (Contributor) is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences and a Lecturer at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna.

Review :
'Both the liveliness and substance of contemporary anthropology in Austria emerge from a collection that also makes an unusually frank and critical appraisal of the discipline’s trajectory there.' Prof. Dame Marilyn Strathern, FBA, Girton College, University of Cambridge; 'It is hard to imagine a better introduction to social anthropology in Austria – both to the history of what it has been (at the heart of a multicultural and multilingual empire) and to the contemporary richness of its interests. Austria’s globally networked anthropologists of today, as this collection amply demonstrates, occupy a privileged position at the heart of Europe that enables them, with unrivalled sensitivity, to mobilize the tools of ethnography and anthropology to tackle key questions of history, culture, and radical change.'Prof. David N. Gellner, University of Oxford.