“Aufrechterhaltung der gemeinsamen Kultur”. Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft und die Österreichisch‐Deutsche Wissenschaftshilfe in der Zwischenkriegszeit

“Maintaining a Common Culture” – The German Research Foundation and the Austrian‐German Scientific Aid in the Interbellum. After the end of the Great War, private as well as public research funding in Austria was anaemic and slow to develop. Whereas the German state‐funded Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) was established as early as 1920, first steps in that direction were only taken in Austria in the late 1920s. In 1929, the Österreichisch‐deutsche Wissenschaftshilfe (ÖDW) was founded under the auspices of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the DFG. Although prima facie on an equal footing, the new research funding organisation was in fact highly dependent on its German cooperation partner. The article explores for the first time ÖDW's position within the German and Austrian science and foreign policies, which aimed to promote the idea of unification of both states within the German Reich. A quantitative analysis of the subsidies policy in the first five years of existence shows that the ÖDW gave financial aid primarily to conservative research fields‘ affecting the intellectual balance of power in the First Austrian Republic. Policy continuities and discontinuities of the organisation in the course of the national‐socialist rise to power in Germany after 1933 are examined in the second part of the article. The article thus both increases our knowledge about the most important German research funding organisation DFG‘ and identifies some of the fundamental structural features of Austrian science policy in the interwar years.     

On expectations in the aftermath of the ‘refugee crisis’: Ethnographic prospects from a post‐industrial German city

At the height of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, right‐wing critics challenged refugees’ rights to asylum. One of the ways they did this was by predicting chaotic, doom‐laden futures. In reality, nobody – neither the communities hosting the refugees, nor the refugees themselves – knew what the post‐crisis future would bring. Anthropologists are in a position to consider that future ethnographically. This article discusses the emerging future expectations of one Afghan family in the German post‐industrial city of Bremerhaven. It attends to the local production of representations of the future during the aftermath of the crisis. The author uses this material to literally look ahead with ethnography and to thereby intervene in the broader context of the politics of expectations. He argues that the earlier we anthropologists can provide detailed accounts of how the future is starting to take shape in our fieldsites, the more efficiently we can stop further fearmongering and the deprivation of human rights. These ‘ethnographic prospects’ may allow us to ask different questions and offer different imaginations of the future.     

Redefining ‘sub‐culture’: a new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities in East‐Central Europe with a case study from early 20th century L'viv‐Lwów‐Lemberg

This paper proposes a new definition of the term ‘subculture’, as a way of better understanding hybrid identities specific to East‐Central Europe, before applying this definition to a case study from the now‐Ukrainian city of L'viv from around 1900. The first section outlines the theory, arguing that the continued focus on the nation state – either from the ‘top down’, or else the ‘bottom up’ as a source of contestation, by historians and anthropologists, has limited the ability to study groups in the interstices of the national projects that typically remain defined in monolithic ethno‐linguistic terms. It examines the theoretical term ‘subcultures’ to propose a new definition that accounts for such hybridity, by having particular sensitivity to context (historical, social, geographical) and cultural practice, in addition to any prevailing national narratives at a given time. The case study in the second section focuses on linguistic hybridity in the city then known more commonly as Lemberg (German) or Lwów (Polish). It argues that Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv produced an urban dialect that blended Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German elements. This dialect should be reassessed as a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than as a linguistic variant of a titular nation. Archival evidence – in particular, court records – is quoted to show that at the lower end of L'viv society, people routinely mixed and transcended linguistic and, thereby, ethnic and religious boundaries. This offers direct evidence of a specific subsection, or subculture, in urban life where people interacted and intermingled intensely. As such, the paper offers new possibilities for investigating ‘hybrid’ identities, as well as proposing a counterpoint to recent research focusing on deliberate indifference or opposition to national segregation for various socio‐political, economic and cultural reasons (Judson 2006: 19–65; King 2002; Zahra 2008).     

From imperial inclusion to national exclusion: citizenship in the Habsburg monarchy and in Austria 1867–1923

This paper examines the development of citizenship in Austria-Hungary between 1867 and the 1920s. At the beginning, the paper analyses the reform of citizenship laws in both Austria and Hungary after the Settlement of 1867. Whilst the Austrian citizenship law maintained legal traditions stretching back into the first half of the nineteenth century, the new Hungarian citizenship law of 1878 emulated the laws in effect in Wilhelmine Germany. The basis of Hungarian citizenship law was, however, much broader than German law, in order to allow for the effective integration of the non-Magyar population. An evaluation of applications for Austrian naturalisation illustrates the remarkable capacity of Austrian citizenship law to integrate and to uphold a concept of nationality independent from ethnicity, religious denomination, class or gender. Only during, and above all after, the First World War did the inclusive practice of the Cisleithanian bureaucracy give way to the more exclusive policy of the new German-Austrian Republic, as civil servants now introduced the vague notion of ‘race’ as a criterion for naturalisation. In contrast to Tsarist Russia and the Second German Empire, both of which introduced similar agendas for nationalisation in the latter part of the nineteenth century linking citizenship to ethnic and religious identity, the Habsburg Monarchy remained basically untouched by such tendencies and with the constitutionally guaranteed principle of ‘national equality’ upheld its early modern tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance well into the later Imperial period.     

The elephant in the sky: On how to grapple with our academic flying in the age of climate change

This article discusses the author’s personal journey into the anthropology of climate change and his concern about the multiple drivers of anthropogenic climate change, among them an increasing number of aeroplane flights around the world, including those made by academics and more specifically, anthropologists. Given that the people who anthropologists often study will be those most severely impacted by the ravages of climate change, it is imperative that anthropologists find strategies to drastically reduce their flying in relation to attending conferences, research meetings and undertaking fieldwork. In this article, the author urges anthropologists to turn their attention to a growing global ‘fly less’ movement.     

Prestige und gemeiner Nutzen Universitätsgründungen im deutschen Spätmittelalter

The medieval German university entered the picture late but thereby as a new and third type of university in Europe besides Paris and Bologna: This was the ruler-controlled ‘Four-Faculties-University’, which powerfully integrated the socially very different associations of liberal arts, theology, medicine, and law. From the beginning on the ‘German type’ was tied to the princely founder, his court, his dynasty, and his territory (in some cases also to the municipal leadership), and it was politically subjected to his will. All foundations produced prestige and dynastic need at first rather than public need (utilitas publica), respectively the advancing of common learned education and science. The great royal dynasties of Luxembourg, Habsburg, and Wittelsbach began founding in Prague, Vienna, and Heidelberg. Up to 1506 all the seven prince electors, some more important princes and big towns of the Holy Roman Empire had their university or had relations to a university. Public need was rather an indirect result: university students utilized surprisingly strongly the possibilities offered by the subsequent university foundations in Germany - about 200.000 people during a long-term 15^th century. However, it has to be thought over in the history of science and effectivity of the German universities in a European frame, that more than 80% of them were ‘only’ students of arts.     

From Empires to Nation-State: Remaking the Roman Catholic Church in an Independent Poland

ABSTRACT

Roman Catholicism is most often imagined as an element of continuity in Poland’s turbulent history: even when a Polish state was absent from the map of Europe from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, a recognizably ‘Polish’ church has been presumed to provide a robust institutional anchor for the Polish nation. This article, however, argues that the creation of a ‘Polish’ Roman Catholic church was a belated and protracted process, one that was only getting started in the years following the achievement of Polish independence in 1918. The church’s ‘Polonization’ was only partially a matter of emancipation from imperial-era restrictions. It often also involved the defence and attempted extrapolation of laws, practices and institutions that had developed under the auspices of the German, Austrian or Russian states and that the Catholic hierarchy viewed as healthy and desirable building blocks for a future Polish church. These imperial precedents continued to provide crucial points of reference in ongoing debates about what ‘Polish’ Catholicism was and what it should become.     

Counter-lineages within the history of anthropology: On disciplinary ancestors’ activism

Anthropologists frequently conceive of their disciplinary history in terms of intellectual lineages linked to ‘schools’ of anthropological theory. This article considers the importance of what might be called ‘counter-lineages’ – intellectual lineages which have tended to be eclipsed from our intellectual history due to interference by the secret state. One such significant counter-lineage is found in the lives and works of American anti-fascist anthropologists during the mid-20th century. During World War II, anthropologists’ findings had tended to support racial equality and anti-fascism. This motivated many to contribute to the war effort. During the post-war period, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and loyalty committees actively targeted anthropologists speaking out against racism in America. The history of how these counter-lineages of public anthropologists eventually ended up marginalized within the discipline is easily forgotten. However, their study can help to inform anthropologists as we face our current crises.     

‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name,You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism,Gender and Hip Hop

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.     

Rum,seduction and death: ‘Aboriginality’ and alcohol

Racism is here examined in relation to its origins in the colonial culture and in the motivations and intents of the colonisers. It is contained in the metaphors and icons, onto which the stereotypical information is projected, which express fear and attempt to tame the native and turn him into a mendicant. Bennelong is shown as the first instance of the British constructing the image of the ‘degenerate native’ the ‘drunken Aborigine’ the ‘urban Aborigine’. Whites are made innocent of the destruction of Aboriginal society because the Aborigines are ‘drinking themselves to death’. This paper asks whether the notion of social pathology has allowed anthropologists to avoid dealing with the realities of Aboriginal social life.     

Is the Aboriginal Landscape Sentient? Animism,the New Animism and the Warlpiri

ABSTRACT It is now commonplace for some anthropologists, and others, to say that for Aboriginal Australians in the remote regions, the landscape is ‘sentient’, however, what that means is not always clear. Are the anthropologists using this term metaphorically or do they understand Aboriginal people to be animists? The ‘new animists' have no doubt that the anthropologists are describing what they call the ‘new animism’. Much of this literature refers to the Warlpiri or their near neighbours. Here I examine the evidence for whether Warlpiri speakers are animists.     

Crisis as method: Critical events and moral breakdowns

This article calls for a deeper consideration of crisis as a method, as spearheaded by anthropologists trained in the Manchester School, including Max Gluckman, who followed extended case studies to track ‘crisis over time’. This approach examines how certain occurrences trigger reflection and deliberation beyond the event and activate critique of interlocutors and anthropologists, reinserting questions of ethics and morality. I argue that crisis as a method facilitates a move away from ‘crisis-chasing’ apparent in anthropology over the past decade, which labels situations as ‘urgent’ while omitting constitutive aspects of social structure. Crisis as a method entails paying attention to the structures that name or call crisis into being and a critical perspective on what constitutes a crisis or noteworthy ‘event’.     

Die ‘Krüppelfürsorge’ in der Weimarer Republik. Zwischen eigenem Standpunkt und diskursiver Anschlussfähigkeit an eugenische Argumentationsstrukturen

The ‘Krüppelfürsorge’ during the Weimar Republic. Oscillating between an Own Position and the Adoption of Eugenic Arguments. This article examines the discourse about physical disability led by the German ‘Krüppelfürsor‐ge’. It deals with the exhibition GeSoLei (Gesundheitspflege, soziale Fürsorge and Leibesübungen), which took place in Düsseldorf in 1926. The GeSoLei was one of the most popular platforms of the healthy and aesthetic body in the 1920s. It stood in the context of the German ‘national recovery’ after World War I and collected all types of medical, social and athletic professionals to expose their work to a broader audience. Also representatives of the so called ‘Krüppelfürsorge’ presented themselves and at the same time their perspective on people with physical disabilities on this exhibition. The article points out the ambivalent character of their perspective and shows the mixture of including and excluding people with physical disabilities, which was typical for the view of the ‘Krüppelfürsorge’. It demonstrates that the ‘Krüppelfürsorger’ on the one hand were quite progressive towards people with disabilities, but on the other hand showed a striking openness towards eugenic values.     

Is native anthropology really possible? (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

Although native anthropologists are often understood to be quite different from non‐native anthropologists, this paper argues that the distinction is not as clear as is often presumed. Both types of anthropologists are partial outsiders who are positioned at a relative distance from those they study in the field. This is illustrated with a discussion of the author's own fieldwork with Japanese Americans as a ‘native anthropologist’. Ultimately, the cultural differences we experience with the ‘natives’ are productive for fieldwork and essential for anthropological knowledge.     

Diapraxis rules OK

Social‐cultural anthropologists' well established tradition of studying conflict resolution has hitherto had only limited application in practical programmes for intercultural ‘mediation’ on a large scale. This guest editorial suggests how the new concept of ‘diapraxis’, a practical replacement for ‘dialogue’, might stimulate a more systematic engagement from anthropologists. Some examples of diapraxis relating to the Islamic world are summarized, as described in a recent issue of Swiss government journal Politorbis.     

Peter Kozler and His Map of the Slovenian Land and Its Provinces (1849–1871)

Early modern regional maps of Europe usually indicated the area occupied by people who were beginning to refer to themselves as Slovenians under various names. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the actual extent of the Slovenian language was depicted on a map and Slovenians were recognized as a nation within the Austrian Empire. Much of the credit for the systematic recording of the distribution of Slovenian speakers can be attributed to Peter Kozler, the Gottscheer German lawyer who compiled his pioneering The Map of the Slovenian Land and Its Provinces [Zemljovid slovenske de?ele in pokrajin] during the political upheavals associated with the ‘Spring of Nations’ and the 1848 Revolution in the Habsburg Monarchy. Although Kozler’s map was completed in 1852 and first printed in 1853, the authorities repeatedly delayed its publication until 1861. This article uncovers the history of the map’s production and eventual publication.     

A critical view of the anthropology of religion

Anthropologists who write textbooks or teach undergraduate courses on the topic of ‘religion’ ought to be more aware of the tradition of critique by religious studies academics of their shared central category. There is a large and growing literature on the modern invention of religion and religions since the colonial era, and the radical shifts in meaning that have occurred in English and other europhone vernaculars since the 17th century. This literature is widely ignored by anthropologists who claim expertise on ‘religion’. ‘Religion’ is a complex, contested product of colonial and class power relations and has been used to control and classify peoples everywhere. The author suggests that the category religion emerged as a placeholder during the colonial era for any institution or practice that impeded (male) private property interests. The idea of ‘religion’ is by no means as innocent and neutral as it appears.     

Organizing the ‘people’s community’: the NSDAP and the ‘ethnic Germans’ in Nazi-occupied territories

ABSTRACT

This article refers to recent scholarly debates on the term ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), which throughout the Third Reich remained rather vague and encompassed often contradictory purposes. It deals with the relations between the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and some of the ‘ethnic German’ (volksdeutsche) organizations to exemplify how German society should be transformed into a ‘people’s community’ after 1933. Thus, it is necessary to analyse the ‘people’s community’ not by asking whether or not its different purposes were realized, but by examining its functions in the Nazi regime. This functional analysis of the ‘people’s community’ focuses on the NSDAP and its relations with ‘ethnic German’ organizations after 1933, primarily in Nazi-occupied territories during the Second World War. First, the article describes the NSDAP’s efforts to align the ‘Germans abroad’ (Auslandsdeutsche) after the seizure of power and to organize the German Front (Deutsche Front) in the Saar territories in 1934/35—an experience serving as a blueprint for the relations between the NSDAP and ‘ethnic German’ organizations during the Second World War. Second, it evaluates the creation of the Ethnic German Community (Volksdeutsche Gemeinschaft) in the General Government and its efforts to organize ‘ethnic Germans’. Third, it interprets the foundation of the German People’s Community (Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft) in Lorraine and its ongoing attempts to establish a racial hierarchy of ‘ethnic Germans’ over the autochthonous French population. Fourth, it looks at the connection between the Germanization of Lower Styria and the launch of the Styrian Homeland Union (Steirischer Heimatbund) as an ‘ethnic German’ movement. The article argues that the NSDAP’s operational routines regarding both the German population and the ‘ethnic Germans’ living in the occupied territories shaped the ‘people’s community’.     

Time and space in the Sri Lanka‐Tamil diaspora

Based upon fieldwork in Sri Lanka and among Tamil migrants in Norway, this article discusses the relationship between space, time and national identity. The author argues that in the Sri Lanka‐Tamil diaspora one finds two different conceptions of Tamil culture, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘revolutionary’. The first expresses a space‐time relationship that is nomadic and grounded in heritage; the second one is sedentary and historicist. The latter serves as a basis for Tamil separatism, the first does not. By propagating the ‘revolutionary’ model of culture, with its particular understanding of space and time, the Tamil separatist movement Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has adopted viewpoints that throughout this century have fuelled the nationalism of the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka. The author argues that instead of explaining social change historically, which is one trend within anthropological theory today, anthropologists should concentrate on exploring under which conditions historical explanations are seen as more valid than their alternatives.     

Seeing into hearts and minds: Part 1. The Pentagon's quest for a ‘social radar’ (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

In this two‐part article, explored are the many funded programmes by which security agencies and private companies mine ‘big data’ and attempt to measure the sociocultural and psychological states of whole populations. How is failure or success measured? What kinds of new institutions/practices might these give rise to? Part 1 ‘The Pentagon's quest for a “social radar”’, published in this issue, comes to terms with today's many sociocultural modelling and forecasting efforts, looks in detail at one company in particular, and ends up reviewing the role of anthropologists in their development and critique. Part 2 ‘“Big data”, algorithms, and computational counterinsurgency’, to be published in a future issue, will analyze the rise of ‘predictive policing’ and its Pentagon connections, reviews two programmes, and poses these in the context of scientists' concerns over artificial intelligence and long‐term human survival.