Sub-projects

Female orangutan with (probably) her offspring, Tanjung Puting, Indonesia.

Evolutionary Psychology

The way we study both ‘foreign’ cultures and ‘other’ species is inseparable from the emotions that are involved when encountering them. The primatological dissertation project explores which affects occur during fieldwork and what role they play in the interactions between humans and other species.

Affects have so far been blinded out in research on travel literature. Beach in Indonesia.

Literature Studies

Although post-colonial literature studies have critically examined many aspects of European testimonies about non-European cultures, affects have so far been blinded out. Two dissertation projects analyze how emotions are explicitly articulated or unconsciously symptomized in fieldwork texts.

Love - Hate - Love: Emotions occur during fieldwork. The picture shows a mobile snack bar on the island of Java.

Social and Cultural Anthropology

The three anthropological projects focus on fieldworkers’ affects and underline their prominent role in the emergence of scientific data and ethnographies. The leading post-doc project aims to assess fieldworkers’ affects empirically, intends to foster researchers’ affective awareness in the field and render their emotions into epistemological means of knowledge production. The developed affective-reflexive methodical tools are made available for junior fieldworkers and students and will be applied in two exploratory and exemplary dissertation projects.

Languages of Emotion

The Researchers' Affects

Sub-projects

Evolutionary Psychology

Literature Studies

Social and Cultural Anthropology