Ronald Stade

Designs of identity: Politics of aesthetics in the GDR

Within less than five decades we could witness the ascent and descent of a national project in East Germany. From the very start, the scope of this project was total, this resembling a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Various cultural themes, with which competing designs for a socialist nation on German soil resonated, gained or lost in force in accordance with historical trends. Such cultural themes, especially those relating to images of collective identity, are interpreted with regard to the aesthetic cum political efforts that went into the construction of a new nation and a new people.

Anthropology, Museums, and Contemporary Cultural Processes: An Introduction−1

The role of ethnographic museums was, to begin with, that of imparting information about foreign cultures. These were, often enough, described as the polar opposites of the civilized places in which ethnographic museums could be found. The museum objects metaphorically represented primitive stages in human development. They appeared like relics even if produced recently. Anthropology, ethnography, or ethnology was the academic discipline which concerned itself with primitive cultures. The ethnographic museum with its harvests of colonial booty therefore seemed like the self-evident medium for conveying anthropological information. Today the preconditions for this constellation have changed. Have museums become inappropriate to communicate anthropological knowledge?Anthropology, Museums, and Contemporary Cultural Processes An Introduction, with Ronald Stade : An Introduction

Debating irony and the ironic as a social phenomenon and a human capacity

What follows is a set of paired articles, followed by a statement by both authors where they debate their distinct positions. Both articles treat irony, but while Rapport looks to it as a possible ...

Diffusion: Anthropological Aspects

To study phenomena like communication, migration, epidemics, and trade is to study diffusion. In social and cultural anthropology, the systematic study of cultural diffusion emerged in contradistinction to speculations about humanity’s cultural evolution from primitive origins to a state of civilization. The research of diffusion has been a constant in anthropology ever since, although the designations for the topics of this research have shifted. This article presents key topics in the anthropological study of cultural diffusion, including acculturation, world system, globalization, and the social life of things.

Introduction : globalization, creolization, and cultural complexity

This special issue of Global Networks is devoted to the work of Ulf Hannerz, whose research in urban anthropology, media anthropology, and transnational cultural processes has established his inter ...

Violent Communication and the Tyranny of the Majority

In recent decades, research on human violence in the social sciences and humanities has focused on debunking the notion that there is such a thing as senseless violence. All types of violence are said to carry meaning and violence ought therefore be considered a form of communication. The anthropologist David Graeber suggests instead that violence, including structural violence, is predicated on a reduction of meaning. According to Graeber, the charging of violence with meaning is an asymmetrical affair: the perpetrators need not bother with understanding their victims; the victims exert themselves to comprehend even the smallest gesture of the perpetrator. Consequently, the retention of power through violence produces systemic stupidity, which is enacted by bureaucrats, the police and other state institutions at all levels. The idea of systemic stupidity will be tested out with the case of Gezi and coupled to a discussion of the tyranny of the majority in order to show that the state monopoly on legitimate violence is not a sufficient precondition for systemic stupidity.