Head of Research Group
Urban anthropology, traditions and cultural heritage, culture as an anthropological concept, globalisation, utopian communes, gift exchange, consensus analysis, general social and economic anthropology, anthropological theory
Japan and East Asia
After graduating with an M.A. in Social Anthropology, Japanese Studies, and Chinese Studies, I obtained my doctorate with a comparative study on the survival conditions of utopian communes (1997) and my habilitation degree with an ethnographic study of the conflicts about the townscape and public traditions of Kyoto (2005), all from the University of Cologne. There I also spent most of my research and teaching career before joining the MPI in 2009. I am committed to a methodologically grounded anthropology of modernity and have a special interest in cities, globalisation, and questions of cultural self-reflection and cultural display, as exemplified by the social uses of cultural heritage in contemporary societies that are my current research focus.
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