Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Von Oswald, Margareta: Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Sophie Eckhardt — 2024-11-19

Henrich, Joseph: The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Julius Riese — 2024-11-19

Foblets, Marie-Claire, Mark Goodale, Maria Sapignoli, and Olaf Zenker: The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology

Sandhya Fuchs — 2024-11-19

Fuchs, Sandhya: Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India

Gaurav J. Pathania — 2024-11-19

Buschmann, Rainer F.: Hoarding New Guinea: Writing Colonial Ethnographic Collection Histories for Postcolonial Futures

Katharina Nowak — 2024-11-19

Lancy, David F.: Learning Without Lessons: Pedagogy in Indigenous Communities

Leberecht Funk — 2024-11-19

Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Justice in the Anthropocene’: Towards a New Anthropology of Justice in the Anthropocene: Anthropological (Re)Turns

Olaf Zenker — 2024-11-19

This introduction to the special issue on ‘Justice in the Anthropocene’ is animated by the central intuition that the new anthropology of justice should be brought into closer conversation with current debates about the Anthropocene. Unpacking this assumption, we first discuss the potentials and limitations of recent anthropological engagements with justice, and develop an analytical definition of this key concept for both ethnographic and political use. We then turn to debates about the Anthropocene and propose disassembling the name-giving global subject of this new epoch – humanity – through a multidimensional justice lens. The third part highlights the mutual benefits of both debates, notably by jointly becoming attuned to the multidimensionality of conflicting concerns for justice and keeping in focus the different roles that various beings, human and non-human, potentially play here. In part four, we discuss the five contributions to this special issue, demonstrating the work of the proposed analytical concept in advancing our understanding of justice in the Anthropocene. Finally, we recapitulate the extended argument put forward in this text for an anthropological turn – or rather: a return leading to a new anthropology (not only) of justice in the Anthropocene, rediscovering and reclaiming the human as an indispensable category of analysis and action, promising useful political returns.

Hustling for Justice: An Analysis of Kenyan Justice Entrepreneurs’ Role as New ‘Agents of Change’ for ‘Sustainable Development’

Nicola Ahoya — 2024-11-19

Justice entrepreneurs are increasingly being proclaimed as ‘game-changers’ within global development discourses coalescing around ‘sustainability.’ With the leveraging of digital solutions for social service provision during the Covid pandemic and the inclusion of ‘access to justice’ on the international development agenda in 2015, market-based and digital justice innovations have gained relevance in the justice sector, particularly in the Global South. In conjunction with the formal recognition of formal and informal channels to justice in Kenya’s justice system and the global development framework, market-based pathways to justice are said to be transformative, as they provide new solutions to defining, achieving, and creating access to justice on people’s own terms.
Drawing on ongoing ethnographic and anthropological research in Kenya, this article critically explores the contested and dynamic terrain of justice entrepreneurship and innovation in Kenya. The paper analyses how, as new actors, justice entrepreneurs are themselves becoming ‘responsibilized’ and ‘responsibilize’ for defining and delivering justice by bringing closely entangled debates about humans as ‘agents of change’ and individuals’ responsibilities for the Anthropocene and sustainable development into a conversation. In exploring these issues, the paper aims to reflect critically on the importance of a definition of justice for academics and practitioners and disagreements over it.

Justice in the Offing? Trade Union Politics in the Shipping Industry

Luisa Piart — 2024-11-19

In this article, ‘the offing’ is used as a metaphor to think about demands for justice. The offing literally refers to the most distant part of the sea in view, while the phrase ‘in the offing’ means that something that is about to happen, or about to appear on the horizon, but is not there yet. The perpetual movement of commercial vessels sailing the oceans and cutting across multiple legal jurisdictions generates risk and profit at the same time. Discussions and struggles to bring about norms of social justice for seafarers working aboard ocean-going commercial vessels thus provide a prime example with which to consider the disembedding of workers’ rights from their national contexts along international supply chains. Oil tankers, container ships and freight carriers of all kinds that form part of the world’s fleet constitute moving working environments where labour-rights violations are everyday occurrences and ethnographic fieldwork often remains off limits. When, where and how is workers’ justice achieved in the liminal setting between shore and the distant offing? Based on ethnographic material, the article situates the anthropology of justice being advocated in this special issue in debates over labour rights in the global economy by questioning the aspirational, technocratic and transnational nature of maritime labour politics.

Negotiations of Justice in the Anthropocene: Mining Conflicts, Unacknowledged Loss and Responsibility for Absent Others

Felix Lussem — 2024-11-19

Starting from the premise that modern legal institutions are increasingly challenged by the temporal and spatial implications of Anthropocene phenomena, this article shows how various civil-society actors struggle for a more just approach to coal-exit policies in the Rhineland’s brown coal-mining region. Contrary to general criticisms arguing that the Anthropocene narrative inherently disregards a differentiated perspective on issues of justice, I follow approaches that engage with the concept’s generative tensions and situate it ethnographically. The article goes on to suggest that growing awareness of the entanglements of industrial infrastructures with planetary crises has led to local protests against mining coinciding with an engagement for future planetary habitability. Whereas mining-induced losses were previously written off as a necessary sacrifice for growth and progress, I discuss how the affected inhabitants reframe them in this emerging context as injustices on a planetary scale. Motivated by a responsibility towards non-human others and coming generations, these coal-critical actors contest official transition measures that center on ‘green growth’ and instead call for situated policies that account for matters of concern related to accelerated planetary change. The article concludes by arguing that the pursuit of justice in the Anthropocene is fundamentally characterized by a responsibility towards absent others, spatially and temporally.

Nature Conservation and Opposition to Wind Power in Rural Germany: Divergent Views on (In)Justice and Environmental Crises in the Anthropocene

Mario Krämer — 2024-11-19

The extension of wind power and the installation of wind turbines in the low-mountain regions of Germany against the background of the national transition to renewable energies is meeting with opposition from some nature conservationists, who perceive a conflict between climate protection and nature conservation. This article illustrates the nature conservationists’ views on questions of (in)justice and the various environmental crises in the Anthropocene. I argue that their opposition to wind power is based on at least three different aspects: commitment to species protection, concern for the aesthetic value of landscapes, and a plea for a degrowth paradigm. In addition, the supposed indifference of the state and national government towards these objectives leads to resentment and is developing a rural consciousness. Methodologically, the article shows that collaborative research in contested settings might have the transformative potential to spin a conversational thread on the urgent question of what is due to whom in the Anthropocene.

Humans as Those Who Must Care and Act: The Mobilizing Rights of Nature in Anti-Mining Struggles in Ecuador

Laura Affolter — 2024-11-19

This article follows Mihnea Tănăsescu’s (2022) call for critical scholarship on rights of nature to examine empirically how and why such rights are used. It does so using the example of resistance to mining in the Ecuadorian Íntag region. Drawing on fieldwork among communities within the area of influence of the Llurimagua copper mining project and with other anti-mining, environmental and human rights activists, I argue that while in academic debates around rights of nature questions of ‘being’ and ontology take centre stage, these issues do not really seem to matter to those who mobilize action to secure these rights. On the contrary, despite the portrayal of rights of nature as posthuman or as more-than- human law, the article shows how, in mobilizing in favour of rights of nature, the human is retained as an important ‘category of analysis and action’ (Zenker and Wolf: 2024) as those who (must) care and can be made responsible.

Politisches Chamäleon: Richard Thurnwald und seine kolonialethnologischen Ansätze in der NS-Zeit

Peter Rohrbacher — 2024-11-19

This study examines Thurnwald’s colonial ethnological activities in the years 1935 to 1945, also taking into account the U.S. context. The first part deals with Thurnwald’s academic position at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin and his attempts to found an Institute for Ethnic Studies (Institut für Völkerforschung). The second part examines with Thurnwald’s conception of a practical colonial policy, which he had already developed in rudiments in the United States. Finally, the third section illustrates how Thurnwald’s volatile behavior affected his interactions with selected colleagues. The sources are drawn from eleven archives in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Epistemologically and methodologically, a source analysis is pursued that combines the approaches of historical anthropology with those of contemporary history for specialized historiography of ethnology.

Content/Inhalt

149-2 — 2024-11-19