Carola Lentz

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Carola Lentz (born April 21, 1954 in Braunschweig ) is a German ethnologist . She is a professor at the Institute for Ethnology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz .

biography

From 1972 to 1979 Lentz studied sociology, political science, German and pedagogy at the University of Göttingen and at the Free University of Berlin . After taking the first state examination for teaching at grammar schools at the University of Göttingen in 1979, she continued her sociology studies there and also worked as a teacher for work and life (DGB) in Göttingen and Braunschweig. Lentz completed her legal clerkship in Hamburg (1981–1982) with the second state examination for teaching at grammar schools.

Subsequently, she also pursued a postgraduate course in agricultural science of the tropics and subtropics at the Institute for Rural Development in Göttingen with the minor subjects ethnology and agricultural sociology, which she completed in 1985 with a master's degree. In 1987 Lentz became Dr. phil. PhD at the Sociological Seminar of the University of Hanover . This was followed by several years of academic collaboration at the Free University of Berlin at the Institute for Ethnology, Regional Area Africa and Europe. From 1992 to 1995 Lentz completed his habilitation with a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). As part of this, she went to the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities, Northwestern University (USA) as a Fellow in May 1993 . From 1995 to 1996 Lentz was a C 3 professor for ethnology at the Institute for Historical Ethnology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . After her habilitation in October 1996, she worked from 1996 to 2002 at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences II at the FU Berlin as a university professor for ethnology ("with special consideration of social anthropology and the ethnology of Africa") at the Institute for Historical Ethnology at Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt a. M. active. From 2000 to 2001 Lentz was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences , Wassenaar (Netherlands). The years in Frankfurt were characterized by intensive collaboration in the SFB 268 “West African Savannah”, in particular the organization of the scientific exchange with the partner university Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso .

From April 2002 to September 2019 Lentz was Professor of Social Anthropology at the Institute for Social Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz , supplemented by stays as a guest at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology , Halle (October-December 2002), and as a Fellow (non-residential) at the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University , Cambridge (USA), with a Fulbright scholarship (2008–2009). From 2011 to 2015 she was chairman of the DGV, German Society for Ethnology (renamed German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2017 ). From October 2012 to July 2013, Lentz was a fellow at the International Humanities College “Work and Curriculum Vitae in Global History” at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 2014 she was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , where she served as secretary of the social science class from 2016 to 2018. In autumn 2014 she was the first German scientist to receive the Melville J. Herskovits Prize. Lentz received this most important international book award in African studies for her work "Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa", a book project on which she worked for over fifteen years. From April to July 2015 she was a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst. From September 2017 to July 2018 Lentz was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , where he headed the focus group “Family History and Social Change in West Africa”. She has been Vice President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences since October 2018. In spring 2019 she spent two months as a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study to participate in a research group on the subject of middle class. From October 2019 she will be Senior Research Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. From November 19, 2020, Lentz will become President of the Goethe-Institut . She takes over the office of the current President Klaus-Dieter Lehmann .

Research priorities

In her research, Lentz focuses on ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of memory, land law, land conflicts, colonialism, ethnography of the state, elite and middle class research, qualitative methods and ethnological cultural theories. Your regional focus is West Africa, in particular Ghana and Burkina Faso. After doing field research in Bolivia, Mexico and Ecuador (1980) and in Ecuador on the subject of labor migration and changing Indian identity (1983–1985), Lentz shifted her focus to West Africa. From 1987 to 1996 she carried out regular field research stays (eighteen months in total) in north-west Ghana on topics of ethnicity, elite and middle class education, labor migration (gold mines), colonial history and the modern role of the chiefdom. In December 1996, she was also an election observer on behalf of the Federal Foreign Office in the parliamentary and presidential elections in Ghana. Burkina Faso is also of particular interest: from 1997 to 2005 Lentz conducted regular field research stays in southern Burkina Faso (ten months in total) on the topics of settlement history, land law, ethnicity and the negotiation of affiliations ("politics of belonging"). The aim was to conduct comparative studies on north-west Ghana. Since 2005, several field research stays have followed in Ghana as part of the “States at Work” research project financed by the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2006 Lentz took over the management of a student research project on police, courts and schools in the Upper West Region of Ghana, in the course of which she also undertook her own research on the history and current situation of the educated elite (s) and the emerging middle class in Northern Ghana. From 2009 to 2013 Lentz coordinated the work of a group of doctoral students on the politics of remembrance and national celebrations in Africa as part of the “PRO Humanities and Social Sciences 2015” program at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. This project was supplemented by student teaching research carried out in 2010. From 2013 to 2019 she continued the topic of national politics of remembrance, national celebrations, nation building and the performative handling of subnational differences in a project funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the research group “Un / doing differences”.

Furthermore, Lentz was and is active in various ways as an editor and reviewer. Among other things, she has been a member of the scientific advisory board of the journal Paideuma since 1996 , from 2004 to 2019 co-editor of the series Mainz contributions to Africa research and from 2005 to 2015 co-editor of the series African Social Studies at Brill (Leiden). She has also been a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal Africa since 2009 and was a member of the editorial team of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie from 2010 to 2015 . Since 2018 she has been a member of the board of trustees of the Heckmann Wentzelstiftung and a member of the scientific advisory board of the Einstein Center Chronoi.

Bibliography (selection)

Monographs

  • Jan Beek, Konstanze N'Guessan and Mareike Späth (eds.): Affiliations. Researching, negotiating, performing in the sense of Carola Lentz (Mainzer Contributions to Africa Research 42). Köppe, Cologne 2019, ISBN 978-3-89645-843-8 .
  • Remembering Independence (with David Lowe) . Routledge, London 2018, ISBN 978-1138905726 .
  • Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN et al. 2013, ISBN 978-0-253-00957-9 .
  • Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana (= International African Library. Vol. 33). Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2006, ISBN 0-7486-2401-5 .
  • The construction of ethnicity. A political history of north-west Ghana 1870–1990 (= studies on cultural studies. Bd. 112). Köppe, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-89645-207-X (also: Berlin, Free University, habilitation paper, 1996).
  • “You can't leave your home country”. Migration in a village community in Ecuador. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1988, ISBN 3-593-34019-4 (At the same time: Hanover, University, Dissertation, 1987; in Spanish: Migración e identidad étnica. La transformación histórica de una comunidad indígena en la Sierra ecuatoriana. Ediciones Abya Yala, Quito 1997, ISBN 9978-04-198-2 ).
  • Seasonal workers on a sugar cane plantation in Ecuador. "Buscando la vida ...". In search of life ... (= socio-economic writings on rural development. 67). Edition Herodot - Rader-Verlag, Aachen 1986, ISBN 3-922868-76-2 (In Spanish: "Buscando la vida". Trabajadores eventuales en una plantación de azúcar. Ediciones Abya Yala, Quito 1991).
  • with Hernán Carrasco: Migrantes. Mariano, Alfonso, José, Lorenzo, Manuel. Campesinos de Licto y Flores. Historias de vida, recopiladas y comentadas. Ediciones Abya Yala, Quito 1985.

Published books

  • with Godwin Kornes: State production, commemorative marathon and folk festival. Africa celebrates 50 years of independence (= Knowledge & Practice. 166). Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-86099-717-8 .
  • Sunkuol WDK Gandah: Gandah-Yir. The House of the Brave. The Biography of a Northern Ghanaian Chief (approx. 1872-1950) (= Research Review. Supplement. 20). Institute of African Studies - University of Ghana, Legon 2009, ISBN 978-9988-1-2466-3 .
  • Sunkuol WDK Gandah: The Silent Rebel. The Missing Years. (Life in the Tamale Middle School (1940-47)) (= Research Review. Supplement. 18, ISSN  0855-4412 ). Institute of African Studies - University of Ghana, Legon 2008.
  • with Anna-Maria Brandstetter: 60 years of the Institute for Ethnology and African Studies. A birthday book (= Mainzer Contributions to Africa Research. 14). Köppe, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-89645-814-0 .
  • with Richard Kuba: Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa (= African Social Studies Series. 9). Brill, Leiden et al. 2006, ISBN 90-04-14817-5 .
  • with Richard Kuba and Claude Nurukyor Somda: Histoire du peuplement et relations interethniques au Burkina Faso. Karthala, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-84586-459-0 .
  • with Richard Kuba and Katja Werthmann: Les Dagara et leurs voisins. Histoire de peuplement et relations interethniques au sud-ouest du Burkina Faso (= reports of the Collaborative Research Center 268 “Cultural Development and Language History in the West African Savannah”. Vol. 15, 2014), SFB 268, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-9806129-4 -5 .
  • with Paul Nugent: Ethnicity in Ghana. The Limits of Invention. Macmillan et al., Basingstoke et al. 2000, ISBN 0-333-73323-1 .
  • Changing Food Habits. Case Studies from Africa, South America and Europe (= Food in History and Culture. 2). Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam 1999, ISBN 90-5702-564-7 .

Web links (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: Carola Lentz invited as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In: Institute for Ethnology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Retrieved July 25, 2019 .
  2. ↑ The new middle class in Africa in comparative perspective ( English ) STELLENBOSCH INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
  3. ↑ Carola Lentz elected as the new President of the Goethe Institute. Retrieved September 30, 2019 .
  4. ^ Editorial board ( English ) Cambridge University Press. Retrieved August 27, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Lentz, Carola
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig