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Eastern Europe and the Caucasus
Description
Because of the limited opportunities for conducting fieldwork behind the Iron Curtain, the anthropology of Eastern Europe has emerged as a research field of its own right only over the past 30 years.
For a long time, the field was dominated by the concept of post-socialism and the question to what extent processes of radical social change would persistently reflect certain aspects of socialist culture. Most recently, this buzzword has visibly lost its appeal and was replaced by a differentiated approach to local political-economic processes. Eastern Europe today is a fertile environment for anthropological research into topical issues like neoliberalism, social inequality, nationalism or depoliticization.
The topic of the anthropology of Eastern Europe is only offered at very few universities in Germany. PD Dr. Ingo W. Schröder (field research on religion and politics in Lithuania) and Dr. Stéphane Voell (field research on legal anthropological topics in Albania and Georgia) cover these areas at the division of Cultural and Social Anthropology in Marburg.