Thomas Widlok

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Thomas Widlok (born June 29, 1965 ) is a German social and cultural anthropologist. He became known for his ethnographic work with ≠ Akhoe Hai // om "San" in southern Africa and for his comparative research on religious and economic anthropology , especially on sharing. He is currently professor for African cultural anthropology at the University of Cologne .

Life

Widlok studied ethnology / ethnology, philosophy and cath. Theology at the universities of Münster and Cologne (MSc with distinction 1989). He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1994 . The dissertation entitled “The Social Relationships of Changing Hai // om Hunter-Gatherers in Namibia” was supervised by James Woodburn at the LSE and formed the basis for his first ethnographic monograph “Living on Mangetti” (1999). (2) Between 1994 and 2006 he worked at a number of universities and research institutes before becoming a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Durham (UK) between 2006 and 2008 . From 2008 to 2013 he was Professor of Pacific Anthropology at theRadboud Universiteit Nijmegen (NL). Since 2013 he has been professor of African cultural anthropology at the University of Cologne, where he received his habilitation in ethnology in 2004.

Widlok spent several years of his ethnological field research in southern Africa (especially in Namibia ) as well as in Australia . He specialized in hunter-gatherer research and published relevant books and magazine articles on the language, society and culture of the ≠ Akhoe Hai // om Northern Namibia and another Khoisan-speaking group in the Namib Desert. He has also done ethnographic research in the Kimberley region of Australia.

As a doctoral student, Widlok was a member of the Cognitive Anthropology research group headed by Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. The research group examined the relationship between culture, language and the cognition of spatial relationships. Since then he has worked at various universities on projects in the research areas of ritual dynamics, property and equality, human mobility and the anthropology of causality and time. His most recent book is a comparative study of the economy of sharing. He has also recently published a volume on interdisciplinary anthropology.

He has been married to the art psychotherapist Dagmar Widlok since 1990.

Research priorities

Widlok's research interests include

  • Key issues of social order
  • economic anthropology
  • Anthropology of rituals
  • Theory of action and morality
  • cultural diversity and universality in terms of space, time and cause
  • cross-cultural hunter-gatherer research

Publications

  • Thomas Widlok: Living on Mangetti. Hai // om 'Bushmen' autonomy and Namibian independence. Oxford University, Oxford 1999.
  • Thomas Widlok and K. Sugawara: Symbolic Categories and Ritual Practices in Hunter-Gatherer Experiences. African Studies Monographs. Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto 2001.
  • Thomas Widlok and W. Tadesse: Property and Equality. Volume 1: Ritualization, Sharing and Egalitarianism. Berghahn, New York 2005.
  • Thomas Widlok and W. Tadesse: Property and Equality. Volume 2: Encapsulation, Commercialization and Discrimination. Berghahn, New York 2005.
  • Thomas Widlok: The anthropology of the economy of sharing. Routledge, London 2017.
  • Thomas Widlok and Th. Breyer: The situationality of human-animal relations. Perspectives from anthropology and philosophy. transcript, Bielefeld 2019.

literature

  • Birgitte Refslund Sørensen: Review of “Thomas Widlok Living on Mangetti. Hai // om 'Bushmen' autonomy and Namibian independence. “ In: Folk. Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society. Volume 43, 2001, pp. 301-304.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Widlok: Sharing: Allowing others to take what is valued . In: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory . tape 3 , no. 2 , 2013, ISSN  2049-1115 , p. 11–31 , doi : 10.14318 / hau3.2.003 ( haujournal.org [accessed March 8, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Widlok, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social and cultural anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 29, 1965