Anthropology

In this course, students analyze classical and contemporary anthropological perspectives on kinship and gender. Students explore ethnographies that consider variations of what is understood by "kinship" and "gender" and their intertwining relationship in different cultural contexts.

This course regards the researcher’s self as a critical resource for ethnographic inquiry, observation and representation in anthropology. Building on queer-feminist debates around participation and positionality and taking The Vulnerable Observer (Ruth Behar, 1996) as a starting point, students are asked to introspectively examine who they are in the world and how that unique location informs the questions they are able to pose and pursue. This includes an understanding of the politics of belonging, experiences of class and queerness, racial or gendered difference, de/coloniality and so on, but equally the ethical and emotional dilemmas posed by their research engagements. Students read works that call into question the sharp divides between academic and other forms of writing, theory and poetry, ethnography and memoir. The course is designed to be interactive and workshop-oriented. Participants engage in short writing exercises in class and are encouraged to draw on their own experiences of life and learning in research.

After the publication of the Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, American society came to be understood as a product of evolution. This class focuses on how Darwin's ideas advanced two different views of change that had a tremendous impact on American culture and cultural history. One view, a racial notion of change, presented larger entities, such as species or “human races,” as the driving forces behind societal development. In contrast, a different view located evolutionary change in the lives of individuals. These views had different implications: the racial view reified biological notions of races and emphasized a struggle for existence as a key dynamic of social life. The individual view, on the other hand, drew attention to the dynamics of the human psyche, the importance of (involuntary) memories and subjective perception of the world. In order to study these two dimensions of turn-of-the-century evolutionary thinking, students read texts by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William James and others.

This course addresses the core concerns of power, domination, inequality, class formation, and transnational political economy, while grounding them ethnographically in urban space. Rather than treating these concepts abstractly, students encounter them through detailed case studies of how colonial spatial logics persist in contemporary cities and how urban residents navigate, reproduce, and contest these structures. The course traces connections between colonial urbanism and contemporary urban transformation across the Global South and in Berlin itself. Students develop analytical tools for understanding how political-economic processes materialize in urban form, social practice, and everyday experience.

This seminar examines the museum as a global institution that emerged through its entanglements with empire, colonial collecting practices, and systems of knowledge production. Divided into two parts, the course first traces the birth and colonial origins of the museum in Europe. It analyzes how collecting, classification, and display became intertwined with imperial ideologies and modes of governance. Finally, the seminar turns to museums in the colony, investigating how these institutions developed distinct trajectories as sites of both imperial control and local agency, as well as their roles in nationalist and postcolonial imaginaries. Through key readings in critical museology, postcolonial theory, and heritage studies, students engage with case studies from Asia and Africa. The seminar concludes by reflecting on what decolonial futures for museums might entail and how curatorial and collaborative practices can challenge established museological frameworks.

This course examines the world of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature, film, music, and art. Through an exploration of iconic works by Indigenous creatives, students will develop a critical understanding of how these mediums express and reflect lived experiences. 

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.

At the end of the course, the student acquires the ability to understand the main classical and contemporary sociological theories and to critically reflect on the fundamental social and cultural mechanisms, identities, and processes. The student acquires the conceptual tools necessary to consider contemporary phenomena of cultural production and consumption. The course focuses on the main concepts to understand classical and contemporary sociological theories and to reflect critically on the socio-historical genesis of contemporary societies and on social mechanisms and social structure with particular reference to the globalized Western world. In particular, the course provides the analytical tools to thematize the genesis of contemporary society from a sociological perspective with particular attention to the classics of the subject and their reflections on modernity and the forms of capitalism; social roles and institutions; social differences and inequalities. Also relevant to this part of the course is a theoretical reflection on sociological styles exemplified by some foundational studies of the subject. The course then considers social interaction more closely in the framework of the debate between structure and action and focuses on the construction of identity and social differences, with particular attention to gender identities. Finally, some of the most important social issues in contemporary societies are considered, with particular attention to the sphere of culture, cultural production, and consumption.

The lecture series brings together thirteen fellows from Humboldt University’s Käte Hamburger Kolleg for Advanced Study ­ – inherit. Heritage in Transformation, whose research spans disciplines to explore what it means to inherit. From colonial legacies and ancestral remains to genetic memory, religious ritual, and postcolonial art, the lectures probe how inheritance shapes belonging, identity, and knowledge itself. Through these diverse projects, the lecture series asks what can be passed on and how, and in what ways does inheritance invite us to rethink the ethics and possibilities of living with the past in the present. The contributors to the lecture series include artists of various media as well as researchers from a wide range of humanities and social sciences, such as anthropology, art history, history, literature, philosophy, political science and sociology. The lecture series introduces trans- and multi-disciplinary humanities approaches with a particular focus on the following three strands of ongoing transformation: decentering of the West (Europe/Global North); decentering of the human; and transformation of value.

This course examines key concepts and debates in the discipline of anthropology, ranging from ritual, totems, kinship, and personhood to the nature/culture distinction and postcolonial critique. It takes a multi-modal approach, familiarizing students with some of the discipline's classic texts, films and sites of ethnographic engagement. We’ll seek to understand these foundational works within their historical contexts, as well as critically reappraising their position in 21st century anthropology.