Personal Profile

Inspired by a long trip through India and Nepal, I studied social anthropology, Japanese studies and Chinese studies at the University of Cologne and, for one year, at Sophia University, Tokyo. I learned a great deal from anthropologists Thomas Schweizer, Peter Tschohl and Thomas Hauschild. I then started to teach social anthropology at the University of Cologne where I obtained my doctoral and habilitation degrees. After a string of visiting professorships in Japanese studies and anthropology at the universities of Düsseldorf, Tübingen and Cologne, I joined the Max Planck Institute. Since 2010, I have been a Head of Research Group, first in the department “Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia”, led by Chris Hann, and now in the department “Anthropology of Economic Experimentation”, led by Biao Xiang. I am also Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg next door.
My research has focused on urban contexts and modern organisational forms. The commons aspect of shared material and symbolic resources has been a recurring concern, as also people’s efforts to reflect about and consciously shape their social and cultural conditions. For my master’s thesis, I visited a number of utopian communes in Japan, asking where they align with and where they divert from mainstream society. In my doctoral dissertation and first book, I extended the scope to historical and present-day communes all over the world. At a time when state socialism was disintegrating, I was interested in the conditions that allow some communes to continue their property-sharing arrangements for decades or even centuries when others fail quickly. Again, both historical and contemporary studies of communes provided the groundwork for systematic comparison, coupled with my own observations from Japan.→ In a smaller project, I also looked into Japanese gift-giving practices.→
Next, I conducted one and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in Kyoto. I was attracted to the ancient Japanese capital and its traditional flair, but also knew that citizens were divided about how to balance historical conservation with modern development. Interacting with citizen activists, public officials, building specialists, owners and ordinary residents, I pursued the citizen protests against a plan to copy a Parisian bridge, the movement for the revitalisation of the traditional town houses, the opposition against high-rise condominium construction, and the organisation of Japan’s most famous traditional festival. The resulting habilitation thesis, later revised into my second book,→ analyses how democratic aspirations and practices, ways to link up with tradition and the past, and the tension between public rights and private interests intertwine in a celebrated historical city. Inspired by this research, I also co-edited books about heritage in Japan→ and urban spaces in Japan.→ I have kept returning to Kyoto ever since and could thus witness a transition: while the built environment was largely left to individual proprietors‘ fancies when I arrived, the city now has the strictest building regulations of all Japan, to almost everyone’s satisfaction. Public authorities and civil society both contributed to this turnaround, but their mutual relationship remains fraught.→
At an early stage, I also wrote about the concept of culture in anthropology, defending it against unwarranted criticism, and about the cultural consequences of globalisation.→ It therefore suggested itself to take my interest in the public life of culture and heritage to the international stage. I embarked on a study of the World Heritage Committee, the UNESCO-affiliated treaty body that keeps the renowned World Heritage List of the most important cultural and natural sites on earth.→ I was interested in how such a global arena operates and how it meets the challenge of applying universal standards in its selection procedures. I visited five of the annual two-week committee sessions, conducted interviews and screened the documentary record, and the book I wrote→ reveals not only the unbroken strength of the nation state on the world stage, but also how unsettled tensions between the Global North and South have dominated the committee’s recent transformation. Complementary to this transnational focus, a research group I led at the MPI conducted local studies of World Heritage in the three cities Istanbul, Turkey; Melaka, Malaysia; and Xi’an, China.→ A book I co-edited assembles further ethnographic studies of World Heritage properties “on the ground” from around the world.→
In search of a new thematic focus for my Kyoto engagement, I then turned to the Buddhist temples that have a major stronghold in this city. Priests had told me that contrary to Buddhism’s otherworldly image, practical and financial issues occupy much of their attention. As this is a generally neglected topic in the study of Buddhism, I decided to lead a second MPI research group on Buddhist temple economies in Asian cities.→ Researchers investigated temples, monks and lay adherents in Ulan-Ude, Russia; Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Shangrila (the former Zhongdian), China; and Tokyo, Japan, focusing on Buddhist practices and moralities regarding money and other resources. I myself spent another half year in Kyoto, studying priests’ attempts to sustain their temples and invest them with new meaning. We also edited a book on the group topic, incorporating further cases from across Asia.→
Kyoto, Japanese society, cultural heritage, UN organisations and Buddhist economies will remain on my research agenda. The current urban building boom in the eastern half of Asia and the construction specialists who make it happen are a likely new thematic focus.

Why Anthropology Now?
Globalisation has been predicted to level all cultural differences, but the more it spreads, the more we are made aware of humans’ inexhaustible potential to generate new ideas, habits and obsessions and to mark out their own distinctiveness. The scholarly discipline most comprehensively interested in human societies and cultures is therefore unlikely to run out of business. Anthropologists have an edge over many other social scientists, I believe, because of the depth of their empirical research: conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork by hanging out with people and gaining their trust, I found, is as effective in Kyoto neighbourhoods as it is in UNESCO meeting halls. It reveals the consciously muted and the unintentionally overlooked, yielding a more complete picture of the human condition than other social scientific methods.
Anthropology also stands out for the range of its comparisons and for extending them to people who rarely stand in the limelight – relating the politics of a Melanesian village assembly to those of a corporate board room comes very natural to us and has great potential for generating the hypotheses that other social sciences with their more macroscopic methods can test. All this is urgently called for in a multiply connected world – we need a realistic sense of what unites and what divides us, and we can’t afford to rely on common stereotypes or our political and economic leaders’ claims. The precondition for all this, however, is an explanatory commitment: anthropologists should be concerned with causes and consequences, not only with representing our interlocutors – in my experience, most of them have no trouble articulating themselves.