Participants – Practices – Theories On the History of Ethnology in the German Democratic Republic


This project intends to develop a systematic intellectual and academic history of the field of ethnology in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It deals with the complex interrelationships and causal connections, in the specific context of the Soviet Sector of Germany / GDR, among the forces of central academic planning, academic traditions, internal dynamics at the local and regional level, and international affiliations and relationships. A key element of this is a determined consideration, taking global political dynamics and processes of change and their effects on scientific policy as well as on the "politics of knowledge" into account, of scientific development in the context of the GDR's history of entanglement with the cold war, the formation of blocs and alliances, global decolonization, liberation and resistance movements, and the events of 1968 and their impact on the scientific landscape of Europe. The project thus relies on a problem- and context-oriented analysis, following the development of a "small discipline" in the context of science policy within the changing political constraints of an increasingly authoritarian state as a paradigmatic case study. In the process, the history of this field, which exists only sketchily and mostly with respect to its political functionality and national context, is expanded towards intellectual and cultural history. The project takes as its starting point the intellectual biographies of three woman who were decisive in shaping the development of the field over three and a half decades. This was unique in all of Germany and even in Europe. In order to accomplish this, two subprojects, one in Bonn and one in Berlin, working in close cooperation, will be addressing various areas of the contested positioning of ethnology in the GDR. Using the ethnography of the Americas as an example of a "classical" regional ethnological field of knowledge (for the Bonn group) and of the conceptual, theoretical, and institutional merging of ethnology and folklore (for the Bonn group), the project will examine how, in changing constellations, ethnology developed sociopolitical strategies of legitimation after 1945.


Principal investigators
Scholze-Irrlitz, Leonore Dr. phil. (Details) (Folklore Studies Berlin-Brandenburg)

Financer
Volkswagen-Stiftung (VW)

Duration of project
Start date: 03/2017
End date: 02/2019

Last updated on 2023-06-02 at 12:20