In my view, anthropology is about being human in a very broad sense: We investigate how humans make a difference, including shapes like 'the individual', 'a person', or dimensions like 'the psyche', 'nature', etc. How they create meaningful worlds over and over again (or destroy them brutally). What stories / texts/ music / images they produce. Which media and tools they use (including their bodies, desires and brains). How they relate to each other to unfold the social and political forms we call 'society', 'nation', 'kinship', etc. - by drawing on reserves known as 'myth' or 'history', unanimously refilling and enriching those reservoirs with something new. All this appears in fields that usually are delineated as 'science', 'religion', 'art' etc.; anthropology, however, focuses on popular or everyday culture as a basic hub for the traffic across those boundaries. Moreover, anthropology tracks and unpacks how the anthropogenic nature of all this passes out of human minds, so that some people almost think dynamics like 'power' or 'status', and appearances as 'males' and 'females', etc., simply are out there, e.g. like those Southern German zoo's signposts on lovely Barbary macaques suggest.
Unfortunately, some of the rather bothersome human inventions, namely 'race' (often camouflaged as something 'ethnic'), and heteropatriarchal gender norms too, in these times found new advocates who attack and persecute people who strive for lives and worlds without those devastations. Some malcontents especially suspect academics at universities (and also in media and museums) to produce a 'gender ideology', they feel assured by momentary triumphs with a so-called 'Genderverbot' for school teachers in some FRG states, and they also try to intimidate and to frighten experts who refuse to withdraw from unimaginably rich accounts of what it means to be human. To be true, this new type of Kulturkampf worries me too, I often feel helpless how to professionally articulate at all in this situation. However, and although vis-à-vis students I always emphasize that a gap between political activism and professional science is necessary to keep alive all tools for worlding (a utopia of a good life for all of us, the political practices to approach it, and a reliable scientific knowledge of humans), considering this 'Genderverbot' I would make an exception: Please do keep me informed, contact details are available below. Wanna know how to prohibit 'gender', wanna learn from your success, and then improve my research and teaching (info on that also below) by applying that sanction-trick not only to 'gender', but also use it to ban 'race', 'class', and all the other concepts, politics, and practices with which humans did and do so much harm among each other and to this planet.
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Timm
Lehrstuhl für Kulturanthropologie
Institut für Kulturanthropologie/
Europäische Ethnologie
Scharnhorststraße 100
48151 Münster
Raum 409
Tel.: +49 (0)251/83-24400 (Geschäftszimmer: Rebecca Riedel)
Tel.: +49 (0)251/83-24401 (Durchwahl)
Elisabeth.Timm@uni-muenster.de
Sprechstunde während des Semesters
Mittwochs 14-16 Uhr nach Vereinbarung per E-Mail.
Informationen zu Gutachten, Referenzen, Empfehlungsschreiben für Studierende und Absolvent:innen