Interventions

As part of the lecture series “Anticipating Anthropologies,” Annemarie Samuels, Associate Professor at the Leiden Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, visited us at the Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Edda Willamowski spoke with her about her lecture “Nurturing the ‘Life Spirit’: Silence and the Ethical Work of Living with Finitude in Indonesia,” held on June 23, 2026, as well as the sociopolitical significance of our field.

Mara Benadusi is an anthropologist based in Catania whose fieldwork spans environmental disaster and industrial pollution – from a petrochemical complex in southeastern Sicily to post-tsunami Sri Lanka and the earthquake zone around Mount Etna. She spoke in our Anticipating Anthropologies series, with a talk titled The Afterlife of Oil: Anticipation, Ruination and the Politics of Late Industrial Futures. We talked with her about long-term fieldwork, the materiality of oil, disaster as opportunity, and what it means to do anthropology that is useful to the people it studies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On January 27, Čarna Brković visited as part of our Anticipating Anthropologies series. Following her lecture, “Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s,” Janine Hauer spoke with her about her passion for ethnographic work and the role of anthropology in the current geopolitical context. Čarna Brković is a professor of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

As part of our lecture series “Anticipating Anthropologies,” Thomas Stodulka, Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Visual Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Professional School at Münster University, was our guest at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology in Halle. Following his lecture “Permaculture Pedagogies and Grassroots Futures in Timor-Leste” on November 18, Anita von Poser, Janne von Seggern, and Edda Willamowski spoke with him about the socio-political significance of our discipline.

As part of our "Anticipating Anthropologies" lecture series, the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Halle recently hosted Judith Bovensiepen. Following her December 16 lecture, "The Erasure of Uncertainty in the Making of Timor-Leste’s Resource Frontier," Philipp Baum spoke with her about the sociopolitical significance of our field. Judith Bovensiepen is the Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology (ISA) in Vienna.

During a seminar on psychological anthropology led by Prof. Dr. Anita von Poser, we had the opportunity to talk to Alexandra Bauer. She had been invited to talk about her exciting research. Alexandra Bauer is a social and cultural anthropologist. She received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin.