Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia.
Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh

Kathrin Eitel (2022), Routledge, ISBN: 9781032154664

This book examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through ‘infracycles’, maintenance practices that tinker with the social and capitalist order, and postcolonial ways of doing politics that co-constitute predominant waste fantasies from which naturecultures ooze out, shaping urban life in their own way.

In this context, socially marginalized waste pickers contest the capitalist system by creating tropes about freedom, labor autonomy, and the will to survive. In this regard, they are also meddling about a new social order that represents the fine line Cambodia is sashaying between tradition and modernity. Waste fantasies that are a result of environmental problematizations, however, perpetuate postcolonial ways of doing politics by exuding notions of waste as detached from its sociocultural context. But ultimately, waste slips through the cracks of these dominant imaginaries and global waste reduction models enacting new versions of what waste and the city is, providing opportunities for another future waste policy.

Open Access Chapter: Access the book by clicking on the image. The complete Introduction can be read and downloaded from here.

Human–Environment Relations and Politics in Indonesia.
Conflicting Ecologies

Kristina Grossmann (2022), Routledge. ISBN 9780367770662

This book analyses how people in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, relate to their environment in different political and historical contexts.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic studies of Dayak people, the indigenous inhabitants of Borneo, the book examines how human-environment relationships differ and collide. These „conflicting ecologies“ are based on people’s relation to the „environment“, which encompasses the non-human realm in the widest sense, including forests, rivers, land, natural resources, animals and spirits. The author argues that relationality and power are decisive factors for the understanding and analysis of peoples’ ecologies. The book integrates different theoretical approaches, sheds light upon the environmental transformation taking place in Indonesia, as well as the social exclusion it entails, and highlights the conceptual shortcomings of universalistic concepts of human-environment relations.

Deltawelten / Delta Worlds.

Leben zwischen Land und Wasser Life between Land and Water

Herausgegeben von Franz Krause, Nora Horisberger, Benoit Ivars and Sandro Simon (2022), erschienen bei Reimer Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-496-01668-7

River deltas are hotspots for global changes in climate, economy and population. How do these dramatic transformations look from the perspective of delta inhabitants? This book, based on ethnographic research in four deltas, illustrates current delta worlds through vivid images and short texts.

We know river deltas mostly from a bird’s-eye view: as fascinating aerial photos with branching river arms, or as alarming maps showing landscapes threatened by climate change. This illustrated book turns that perspective around. We meet the inhabitants of deltas in Brazil, Canada, Myanmar and Senegal face to face. We get to know their daily lives, their worries, hopes, challenges and inventiveness. Through vivid images and short texts, this book shows that the lives of these people are not only determined by abstract processes such as climate change, economic crises and population growth. Rather, these processes are part of other – and often more important – dynamics in the deltas. Based on the four authors’ ethnographic research, this book provides insights into the diverse, but often similar, forms of community, movement, colonial heritage, volatile terrain and flexible traditions in deltas.

Anthropologie im Anthropozän. Theoriebausteine für das 21. Jahrhundert

Christoph Antweiler (2022), erschienen bei WGB. ISBN 978-3-534-27434-5

We live in the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human activity is the human activity is the decisive factor in planetary change. This is not just about climate change, but about an irreversible transformation of the entire earth’s surface, unprecedented in the unprecedented in the history of the earth. The Anthropocene is the subject of central debates in current science and of contemporary science and world politics. It is about fundamental questions about the relationship between societies and material environments and the position of humans in nature. What is the potential for anthropological syntheses in the concept of the in the concept of the Anthropocene? What is the significance of cultural and questions and knowledge for the discussion of the Anthropocene?
What blind spots exist from an ethnological perspective in the theorizing to date? How could a transdisciplinary synthesis of a geoanthropology look like? This book offers a critical and transdisciplinary orientation.

Podcast (10 Min.): Ist der Mensch eine Naturkatastrophe? | deutschlandfunkkultur.de.
Open Access Chapter: Access by clicking on the image

NaturenKulturen. Denkräume und Werkzeuge für neue politische Ökologien

Herausgegeben von Frieda Gesing, Michi Knecht, Michael Flitner und Katrin Amelang (2019), erschienen bei Transcript. ISBN: 978-3-8376-4007-6

Dieser Band vermittelt Einblicke in ein neues Forschungsfeld an der Schnittstelle von Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie, Geografie und Science & Technology Studies und stellt mit den »NaturenKulturen« ein Konzept vor, mit dem sich das Verhältnis von Natur und Kultur neu bestimmen und politisch situieren lässt. Beiträge von Anna Tsing, Steve Hinchliffe, Uli Beisel, Banu Subramaniam, Sven Bergmann und anderen laden dazu ein, »NaturenKulturen« als Denkraum zu verstehen und neue Konstellationen von ökologischen Prozessen, technischen Artefakten und mehr-als-menschlichen Akteuren zu erforschen.

The Promise of Prosperity. Visions of the Future in Timor-Leste

Edited by: Judith Bovensiepen (2018), DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/PP.2018

For the people of Timor-Leste, independence promised a fundamental transformation from foreign occupation to self-rule, from brutality to respect for basic rights, and from poverty to prosperity. In the eyes of the country’s political leaders, revenue from the country’s oil and gas reserves is the means by which that transformation could be effected. Over the past decade, they have formulated ambitious plans for state-led development projects and rapid economic growth. Paradoxically, these modernist visions are simultaneously informed by and contradict ideas stemming from custom, religion, accountability and responsibility to future generations. This book explores how the promise of prosperity informs policy and how policy debates shape expectations about the future in one of the world’s newest and poorest nation-states.

Our Common Denominator. Human Universals Revisted

Christoph Antweiler (2018), Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-78533-824-3

Since the politicization of anthropology in the 1970s, most anthropologists have been reluctant to approach the topic of universals—that is, phenomena that occur regularly in all known human societies. In this volume, Christoph Antweiler reasserts the importance of these cross-cultural commonalities for anthropological research and for life and co-existence beyond the academy. The question presented here is how anthropology can help us approach humanity in its entirety, understanding the world less as a globe, with an emphasis on differences, but as a planet, from a vantage point open to commonalities.

Zeitschriftenbeiträge

Antweiler, Christoph (2022). Ethnologie im Anthropozän. Eine postulierte Megamakroepoche und ein lokal orientiertes wie gegenwartsbezogenes Fach. In: Roland Hardenberg, Josephus Platenkamp & Thomas Widlok (Hrsg.): Ethnologie als angewandte Wissenschaft. Das Zusammenspiel von Theorie und Praxis (Studien zur Kulturkunde, 136) Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag: 361-383.
Bovensiepen, Judith (2022). Governing through opacity: customary authority, hidden intentions and oil infrastructure development in Suai, Timor-Leste. Special Issue on ‘Governing Opacity’, edited by N Buitron and H Steinmüller. Ethnos (online first): 1-22.
___ (2021) Can oil speak? Difference and ambivalence in Timor-Leste’s oil infrastructure development. Anthropological Quarterly 94 (1): 625-651. Full manuscript is available here.
___ and Mathijs Pelkmans (2020) Wilful Blindness. Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 40(4).
Eitel, Kathrin (2022). Reshuffling Responsibility: Waste, Environmental Justice, and Citizenship in Cambodia. In: Worldwide Waste. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 5(1), 1-13. DOI: 10.5334/wwwj.87 .
___ (2021). Oozing Matters. Infracycles of ‘Waste Management’ and Emergent Naturecultures in Phnom Penh. In: East Asian Science, Technology and Society 15 (2): 135-152.
___ and Michaela Meurer (2021). Introduction. Exploring Multifarious Worlds and the Political Within the Ontological Turn(s). Berliner Blätter 84: 3-19.
García Ruales, Jenny (2022). Encuentros (horizontales) con el Mundo Humano y Vegetal en el Jatun Kawsak Sisa Ñampi.
In: Sarah Corona Berkin and Olaf Kaltmeier. Producción de Conocimientos en Tiempos de Crisis: Dialogando desde la Horizontalidad, Guadalajara: Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, Calas, 127-141.
___ and Benedict Mette-Starke, Joaquín Molina, and Naomi Rattunde (2022). Sharing Messages, Not Meals: Engaging with Non-Humans in Fieldwork during the Pandemic. Journal for Social and Cultural Anthropology 174: 75-98.
Großmann, Kristina (2022). Multi-Layered Reflexivity in Participative Research on Mining in Indonesia. Anthropology in Action, 29/3: 40–47, doi:10.3167/aia.2022.290305.
___ and Gullo, Alessandro (2022). Mining and masculinity in Indonesia. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2021.2019824.
Krause, Franz (2022). Inhabiting a Transforming Delta: Volatility and Improvisation in the Canadian Arctic. In: American Ethnologist 41(1): 7-19.
___ (2022). Rhythms of wet and dry: temporalizing the land-water nexus. In: Geoforum 313: 252-259.
___ (2022). The Tempo of Solid Fluids: On River Ice, Permafrost, and Other Melting Matter in the Mackenzie Delta. In: Theory, Culture & Society, 39(2): 31-52.
___ with Nigel Clark, Sasha Engelmann, Paolo Gruppuso, Tim Ingold, Gavin Lucas, Germain Meulemans, Cristián Simonetti, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Laura Watts (2022). A Solid Fluids Lexicon. In: Theory, Culture & Society 39(2): 197-210.
Liebig, Oliver D. (2022). „Cambio, continuidad y resistencia en la pesca de San Dionisio del Mar.“ In: Zanotelli, Francesco und Laura Montesi (Hrsg.): Los Huaves en el Tecnoceno. Disputas por la naturaleza, el cuerpo y la lengua en el México conteporáneo. Editpress, Florenz.
Lubabun Ni’am, Stasja Koot, and Joost Jongerden (2021). “Selling captive nature: Lively commodification, elephant encounters, and the production of value in Sumatran ecotourism, Indonesia.” Geoforum 127: 162–170.
McAdam-Otto, Laura (2022). “It’s all about the beaches”: Sargassum algae, tourism, and coastal transformations along the Mexican Caribbean. In: Coastal Studies & Society 0, 1-22. DOI: 10.1177/26349817221132379.
Reuter, Thomas A. (2022). ‘Endangered Food Systems: Agriculture, Nutrition and Cultural Heritage in Bali, Indonesia.’ Unisia: Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities  40/1:1-12. 
___ (2021). ‘Climate change as a cultural artifact: Anthropological insights to help avert systemic collapse.’ Economic Anthropology 8/1:175-179. https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12197
___ (2021). ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Systemic Stress Test: Who is most vulnerable to food insecurity and other risks in a crisis and why?’ CADMUS, 4(4, June 2021):147-152. Online at https://cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-4/issue-4/covid-19-as-systemic-stress-test. 
___ with Graeme MacRae (2020). ‘Regaining Lost Ground: A Social Movement for Sustainable Food Systems in Java, Indonesia.’Anthropology of Food, https://journals.openedition.org/aof/10292
Simarmata, Hendricus Andy, Anna-Katharina Hornidge & Christoph Antweiler 2020: “Assessing Flood-related Vulnerability of Urban Poor: An Empirical Case Study of Kampung Muara Baru, Jakarta“. In: Greg Bracken, Paul Rabé, R. Parthasarathy, Neha Sami & Zhang Bing (eds.): Future Challenges of Cities in Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (Asian Cities, 11) and International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA): 183-208.
Wergin, Carsten (2021). Listening “Care-Fully”: Acoustemologies of Hope in the Face of Human-Made Environmental Degradation. Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 10(2): 24-37. https://doi.org/10.4000/cadernosaa.3739 (with Edwin Mulligan).
___ (2021). Understanding Multispecies Mobilities: From Mosquito Eradication to Coexistence, in: M. Hall and D. Tamir (eds.) Mosquitopia: The Place of Pests in a Healthy World. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 33-46. (with U. Beisel) Direct Link: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003056034-4/understanding-multispecies-mobilities-uli-beisel-carsten-wergin.
___ (2018).Collaborations of Biocultural Hope: Community Science Against Industrialisation in Northwest Australia. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 83 / 3: 455-472. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2016.1169203
Wijngaarden, Vanessa (2021). Relationality.In: Ballamingie, P. & D. Szanto, Showing Theory to Know Theory: Understanding social science concepts through illustrative vignettes. Ottawa: Showing Theory Press. Pp. 394-400. https://dx.doi.org/10.22215/stkt/wv19. 
___ Barrett, M.J., V. Hinz, V. Wijngaarden & M. Lovrod (2021). ‘Speaking’ With Other Animals through Intuitive Interspecies Communication: Towards Cognitive and Interspecies Justice In: Hovorka, A.J., S. McCubbin & L. van Patter, A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pp. 149-165. ISBN 9781788979986. Abstract and chapter
___ and G.E. Idahosa (2021). An integrated approach towards decolonising higher education: A perspective from Anthropology. In: Woldegiorgis, E., A. Brahima, A. & I. Turner, Decolonisation of Higher Education in Africa: Perspectives from Hybrid Knowledge Production. London: Routledge, pp. 36-59. ISBN 9780367360603. Abstract and website