Anthropology in Austria has long entertained lively, fairly continuous, and multi-facetted interactions with the UK. These have ranged from Habsburg Empire citizen Bronislaw Malinowski’s odyssey through London to the Trobriand Islanders, Siegfried Nadel’s emigration to England from Vienna through Berlin, Christoph Fürer-Haimendorf’s dissociation from Nazi-occupied Austria in moving to British India and later to SOAS; Vienna-born Scarlett Epstein’s affiliation with Max Gluckmann and the Manchester school, to Ernest Gellner’s engagement with those intellectual legacies of Central Europe in which his parents had grown up. Many of those past interactions in fact were related to Austrian movements of intellectual and political thought.

Yet Anthropology in Austria has completely re-organized itself in recent decades, and has opened up to the world more than ever before. Today it represents a major branch in German-speaking and European social anthropology. The RAI’s day of anthropology in Austria strives to take stock of these recent developments by presenting and discussing major trends, advances, and insights in the fields of regional studies, qualitative methodologies, and topical areas of interest. Several of anthropology’s key representatives in the Austrian Academy of Sciences and at the University of Vienna will reflect critically upon the directions anthropology in Austria is taking in the early 21st century. This will focus on studies in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, on comparative and historical methods, and on fields ranging from mobility and refugee studies to the anthropology of art and of the environment, and medical anthropology. Contributors will include several mid-career scholars as well as Ayşe Çağlar, Thomas Fillitz, Andre Gingrich, and Peter Schweitzer.

This event is free, but registration is required:
austriananthropology.eventbrite.co.uk