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The position paper conveys the difficulties of practicing fieldwork and ethnography in times of lockdowns, travel bans, physical and social distancing to university administrations, funding agencies and also the wider public. It is the result of a collective effort by all organizers and participants of the DGSKA (German Anthropological Association) Online Autumn Academy that took place in October 2020. The attached document reads most complementary to the participants' blog contributions 'Fieldwork in Crisis'.

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Minh Nguyen is giving a lecture at the University of Erlangen – Nürnberg on Thursday, 5^th November from 6pm to 8pm.

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We are excited to announce our next seminar in the Understanding Asia Colloqium Series. On 24. Nov. 2020, Professor Pierre Petit (Université libre de Bruxelles) will be presenting his research.

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Wir freuen uns das nächste Seminar in unserer "Understanding Asia" Kolloqium Reihe anzukündigen. Am 24.11.2020 wird Professor Pierre Petit (Université libre de Bruxelles) einen Vortrag über seine Forschung halten.

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Phill Wilcox, from AG Social Anthropology, Bielefeld University, has co-convened a roundtable on digital methodologies for the EASA 2020 conference on 22. July 2020.

The roundtable “Methodologies on and offline: doing ethnography ethically in the digital age” examines how digital technologies impact the anthropological methodology by discussing issues related to the ethics of digital research, the contemporary understanding of the field site, public intimacy, data management, the notion of public/private, and online/offline identities.

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• Professor Dr. Minh Nguyen has published the paper Portfolios of Social Protection, Labour Mobility and the Rise of Life Insurance in Rural Central Vietnam in Development and Change.
• Dr. Jake Lin has published the paper Psyche Matters: Resistance from the Chinese Sweatshop of the World in Perspectives on Global Development and Technology.
• Dr. Phill Wilcox has published a paper “Don't ever change”? Cultural heritage and social development in “timeless” Luang Prabang in Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development.

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In summer term 2019 the Working Group Social Anthropology organizes a lecture series with the title “Understanding Asia: Senses, Forms and (Infra)Structures”. Within the series four external researchers - Prof. Dr. Czarina Saloma-Akpendonu; Prof. Dr. Christina Schwenkel; Prof. Dr. Kelvin E.Y. Low and Dr. Dominik Müller - will hold a lecture. All those who are interested are cordially invited!

For the exact dates, time, venue and topics please see the poster attached.

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Am Mittwoch, den 16. Januar 2019 hält Prof. Dr. Minh Nguyen ihre Antrittsvorlesung zum Thema "Waste and Wealth: Labor, Value and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy". Die Veranstaltung findet um 12 Uhr (c.t.) in X-E0-002 statt.

Bevor Minh Nguyen Anfang 2018 Professorin für Sozialanthropologie an der Faktultät für Soziologie an der Universität Bielefeld geworden ist, hat sie sechs Jahre am Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung in Halle (Saale) geforscht.

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Phill Wilcox receives Bielefeld Young Researcher's Fund for her Projekt "One World: One Dream? The rise of China in Laos".

This project investigates perceptions of China and Chinese influence in Laos. Currently, a major railway is under construction from China that will cover approximately half the territory of Laos. My aim is to use the Lao-China railway as a means to investigate Laos at a time of change, and implications for Laos, Southeast Asia and ASEAN.

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Waste and Wealth. An Ethnography of Labor, Value, and Morality in a Vietnamese Recycling Economy (Oxford University Press)

Waste and Wealth examines questions of value, labor, and morality underlining the translocal waste trading networks originating from a rural district in Vietnam. Considering waste as an economic category of global significance, this book shows migrant laborers' complex negotiations with political economic forces to remake their social and moral lives. It also illuminates how the waste traders seek to construct viable identities in the face of stigmatization, insecurity, and precarity. Waste and Wealth makes an important contribution to global studies of human economies and post-socialist transformations, demonstrating how the forces of globalization blend with local historical-cultural dynamics to shape the valuation of people and things.

Waste and Wealth is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.

Reviews

"Waste and Wealth is an outstanding ethnography brimming with vivid details and insights about the lives of Vietnamese waste traders. Tracing the livelihood strategies, hopes, dreams, and struggles of Spring Village traders, Minh Nguyen takes readers on a riveting series of journeys throughout the nation's capital city, Hanoi, and surrounding areas. It is a story of hard, dirty labor, but also of resilience, social mobility, and economic uplift. The waste traders in this book are not only turning waste into gold, but literally remaking themselves, their village, and Vietnam's new rural economy."--Erik Lind Harms, Yale University

"With this compellingly written and highly original ethnography, Nguyen shows how informal recyclers remake themselves, their relationships, and their circumstances, laying to rest the assumptions that waste is inherently worthless and that those who work with it are doomed to abject poverty. The book is clearly written, demonstrating complex entanglements of dirty work, class aspirations, and gender politics in a post-socialist context."--Joshua Reno, Binghamton University

"The ethnography is skillfully crafted, drawing readers into people's lives with a keen appreciation of how they juggle competing moralities and demands on their lives. Nguyen's theoretical contribution is deft, efficient, and--as with the best ethnography--lightly and dexterously woven through her material."--Catherine Alexander, Durham University

Link to the book

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Am 1. November 2018 findet die 16. Annual Nepal Lecture des Britain-Nepal Academic Council statt. Dort hält Frau Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka einen Vortrag zum Thema ‘Belonging to Academia? Higher Education, Inequality, and Development’.

Weitere Informationen.

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Über das asienwissenschaftliche Netzwerk "Shaping Asia/s", welches von Frau Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka und Christiane Brosius (Universität Heidelberg) initiiert wurde ist in der aktuellen Newsletter des Instituts für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften (IAAW) der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ein Artikel erschienen sowie in dem aktuellen Newsletter des ZIF.

IAAW Newsletter

ZiF Newsletter

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Prof. Dr. Minh Nguyen. Foto: Universität Bielefeld

Für ihre sozialanthropologische Forschung über Ost- und Südostasien erhält Minh Nguyen einen ERC Starting Grant des Europäischen Forschungsrats (European Research Council, ERC). Dieser fördert exzellente und vielversprechende Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen und Nachwuchswissenschaftler. Minh Nguyens Forschung wird über fünf Jahre mit einer Summe von etwa 1,5 Millionen Euro gefördert. Sie ist die dritte Forschende der Universität Bielefeld, die einen der wichtigsten EU-Förderpreise erhält.

Pressemitteilung der Universität

Minh Nguyen has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for her social anthropological research on Eastern and Southern Asia at the Faculty of Sociology. These grants aim to promote excellent and promising young academics. Minh Nguyen’s research will receive a total of approximately 1.5 million euros funding over a period of five years. She is the third researcher at Bielefeld University to receive one of these major EU prizes to promote science.

Press release of the university

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Date: July 12-13 2018
Venue: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) Bielefeld University
Conveners: Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka and Éva Rozália Hölzle

Belonging, as an everyday experience of being in the world, commonly evokes positive associations, yet collective belonging is an ambiguous social practice. Be it on biological, ethnic, economic or political grounds, belonging comes with a price. "Social contracts" rewarding a person with entitlements and safety simultaneously confront her with claims of loyalty, lifelong commitments, and limitations on personal freedoms. Incorporation may lead to collisions of social expectations, conflicts between individual will and "collective good", and tensions between personal autonomy and social bonding. Due to the "symbolic power" (Bourdieu) of belonging, such tensions frequently remain concealed, and personal obligations are rarely acknowledged as sacrifices or submissive. Our aim in this workshop is to deepen the understanding of human sacrifice that belonging tacitly implies. We will look into the interior of human bonds that are less about a relationship between the self and a different "Other" and more of a relationship between the self and a distinct "Same", a perspective that will hopefully guide us to the hidden spheres of belonging.

The workshop is funded by:
European Association of South Asian Studies (EASAS)
German Research Foundation (DFG)

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