Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Content/Inhalt

150-1 — 2025-09-22

Strümpell, Christian: Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in Eastern India

Jonathan Parry — 2025-09-22

Vepřek, Libuše Hannah: At the Edge of AI. Human Computation Systems and Their Intraverting Relations

Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda — 2025-09-22

Whitehouse, Harvey: Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World

Raúl Acosta — 2025-09-22

Loyen, Ulrich van: Nachkriegsschamanismus. Beiträge zu einer Kultur der Niederlage

Michaela Schäuble — 2025-09-22

Pérez, Miguel: The Right to Dignity. Housing Struggles, City Making, and Citizenship in Urban Chile

Elena Hernández — 2025-09-22

Ceci n’est pas un book review

Konstanze N’Guessan — 2025-09-22

Call for Papers – Shortcuts

The Editors — 2025-09-22

Sāmoa at Large: The Sacred Circle and Travelling Fale and Measina

Philipp Schorch — 2025-09-22

In the essay ‘Our sea of islands’, Epeli Hau‘ofa (1994:151–3) influentially argued for ‘what may be called “world enlargement” carried out by tens of thousands of ordinary Pacific Islanders right across the ocean.’ Hau‘ofa further stressed that ‘there is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands”’.’ ‘The second,’ he concluded, ‘is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships.’ This special section takes up ‘things’ in their material sense. Their travels have amounted to hundreds of thousands of journeys over centuries beyond Oceania and on a global scale. Fale (Sāmoan houses) have been (re)erected in a range of exhibition formats, from the colonial Völkerschauen (human zoos or ethnic shows) (Balme 2008, Thode-Arora 2014) to contemporary art biennials, as well as on university campuses and in tourism resorts. Similarly, measina (Sāmoan material treasures) can be found in museum collections from anthropology via art to natural history, as well as in commercial centres and political institutions. This mobile artifactuality has carried its own cosmological foundations with it, such as the underpinning sacred circle, genealogical inscriptions and cultural meanings, thus embodying a kind of reality that allows for the (re)activation of experiences of Sāmoanness, at home and/or abroad, for example, through architectural interventions, curatorial practices and virtual exhibiting.

Fa‘asāmoa Forever – The Sacred Circle. The Politics of Encompassment and Consensus

Serge Tcherkezoff — 2025-09-22

This article examines the remarkable permanence of fa‘asāmoa, Sāmoan custom, throughout the upheavals of history. The strength of this permanence lies in a particular configuration of what brings the community together at meetings when an important decision has to be taken: an equality of positions in the community circle where everyone faces one another, in the sense that everyone is seated at the same level. But this equality is maintained by a bond of higher value, sometimes called the ‘country’, ‘custom’ or even ‘God’. This is what the Sāmoans call the ‘sacred circle’. Each time, this hierarchy of references makes it possible to find a way not to ignore but to position the conflict at an ‘encompassed’ level, leaving the community value at the ‘encompassing’ level. The article describes how this works through historical examples, from German colonization via the construction of independence in the 1960s to the latest national elections in 2021, which saw fierce competition between two political parties, as well as considering the way in which consensus is favoured over majority voting.

Tofiga: Place and Belonging in Samoan Architecture

Albert L. Refiti — 2025-09-22

The Samoan world opens with the notion of nu‘u tofi, in which every person is assigned a place or position that resonates with culture, polity, citizenship and governance. Tofi (or tofiga) places Samoans according to their ancestral connections within the order of the Samoan world, as ‘the reference point of political action and motivation’ (Tui Atua) – for instance, matai (chiefs) sitting in front of the pou (posts) of the fale (house).

From Objects to Measina: Reanimating the Sāmoan Collection at the Übersee-Museum Bremen in Cooperation with the National University of Samoa

Stephanie Walda-Mandel — 2025-09-22

The last few years have seen increasing calls for German institutions to change their approach to collections from colonial contexts. Concomitantly, pressure has been put on museums to digitize and open up collections to new audiences, which has been further exacerbated by access issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article addresses developments at the Übersee-Museum Bremen as it seeks to re-examine, reorganize and reconnect its Oceanic (in particular Sāmoan) collection in partnership with the National University of Samoa (NUS). Through a collaborative approach that involves a curator and an academic intern of Sāmoan descent working in the museum in Bremen, the Übersee-Museum is revamping its museological practices and interpretation as it develops its first digital project on Oceania. Through workshops with partners in Sāmoa, the team develops topics and plans content informed by Sāmoan perspectives. Working across disciplinary boundaries, the exhibition highlights novel insights into fluid configurations of cultural practices and environmental cosmologies based on the interplay of material collections. This article examines some examples of the ways in which interpretative authority on the part of the curators in Bremen is relinquished and shifted towards Sāmoan perspectives on measina (treasures) within museum spaces, both physical and virtual.

Of Slumbering, Patient Objects Awaiting our Arrival (Or Maybe Return)

Christine Winter — 2025-09-22

It is my honour, as a German scholar and historian of Pacific-German connections, to send the collection of insights, thoughts and hopes edited by Safua Akeli Amaama and Philipp Schorch onwards and to wish it well. For a conclusion would mark the essays as finished, as artifacts of scholarly accomplishments, published and bounded. Instead, this is an invitation to engage with innovative curatorial practices that connect and invigorate museum collections, and celebrate enduring Sāmoanness that is strong at home and remains so throughout many mobilities.

Placenames and belonging: the Case of Kibra’s Nubians, Kenya

Joh Sarre — 2025-09-22

Approximately 25,000 Nubians live in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, which they consider their ancestral home. As descendants of African soldiers in Britain’s colonial armies, they have faced marginalization and de facto statelessness. Joh Sarre’s dissertation examines their overlooked experiences, focusing on the negotiation of contested notions of belonging, inclusion and exclusion.
The study is structured around three interrelated perspectives: conceptual, methodological and empirical. The first major chapter explores the historical entanglements of land, ethnicity and politics in Kenya, which forms the background against which Nubian claims to belonging are negotiated. Joh Sarre examines how powerful discourses around land-ownership and ethnic identity influence Nubian (non-)belonging to Kib(e)ra and the Kenyan nation.
In three empirical chapters, Joh Sarre analyses the spatial practices through which Nubian belonging is being performed and negotiated. The first of these chapters discusses contested place names in Kibera, showing how Nubians use oral history and naming practices to assert Nubian firstcomer claims. It is this chapter that this article expands upon. The second empirical chapter in the book explores Nubian weddings and wedding processions as performative acts of belonging. The third empirical part focuses on burial practices at and negotiations around the (re)naming of the ‘Kibra (Nubian) Muslim Cemetery’, highlighting how religious and cultural norms determine belonging, inclusion and exclusion in death.
The final part of the dissertation synthesizes findings within the broader context of politicized ethnicity in Kenya. The study concludes that belonging is a practical negotiation of identity, and that space/place serve as key frameworks for analysing these dynamics. By exploring land, ethnicity and social practices, the study contributes to discussions on identity formation, marginalization and recognition in Kenya and beyond.

The workshop at home. Making sense of craft as a social practice among Tuareg artisans in Niger

Valerie Nur — 2025-09-22

This article draws on my dissertation on Tuareg craftsmanship in Niger as a social practice, which was published under the title ‘Die Unbeständigkeit der Dinge: Handwerk, Familie und Mobilität bei den Tuareg in Niger’ (The Impermanence of Things: Craft, Family and Mobility among the Tuareg in Niger) (2024). It explores craft as an embodied knowledge acquired and shared within the family. First, I show how I approached handicraft methodologically from an anthropological perspective. My entry into craft was my own bodily experience in touching, treating and shaping leather, wood and silver. I understood craft as a perception of the world, of tools and things, and studied the materiality and possibilities Tuareg artisans see in them. Second, I aim to show how I made sense of craft as a social practice. Most often, Tuareg artisans work at home in the middle of everyday family life. The same way the family was involved in the workplace, clients and craft-related conversations have been part of and thus shaped family life as a matter of course. Children grow up acquiring handicraft skills just because participating in everyday family life means practicing the trade. The family informs the perception of things and merges with technical routines and innovations that arise in the workshops at home. My concern is to capture the ordinariness of craft, how craftmanship is socially made, just as the family members relate to each other in technological terms.

Nachruf auf Hermann Amborn (1933–2024)

Annette Hornbacher — 2025-09-22