Frau Dr. Éva Rozália Hölzle

Research projects

Kinship Generations: Ethnographic Perspectives from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (scientific network project funded by German Research Foundation; together with Dr. Magdalena Suerbaum)
Kinship, once perceived by anthropologists as a relic of the past, has not lost its significance in our increasingly globalised contemporary world. In fact, for many people, kinship remains the most important way to express how they relate to the world and find their place in it. At the same time, generation, as a way of talking about historical periods, social movements, differences between ‘young’ and ‘old’, or social change and reproduction, has captured the public’s imagination time and again. Contemporary heated public discussions about generations X, Y, and Z, their world views, and their expectations for the future offer an example of the ongoing social relevance of the term and category of generation.
By taking a closer look at how kinship and generations mutually constitute each other, the proposed network—‘Kinship Generations: Ethnographic Perspectives from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East’—strives to achieve not only conceptual clarity as far as generations is concerned, but also to provide fresh insights into social generativity from cross-cultural perspectives. Adopting a processual approach, the network of scholars involved in this project perceive kinship as ‘a fraught and formative field in which meanings are constantly being made and unmade’ (Jackson 2017, 102). Similarly, in relation to generation, the network favours a dynamic understanding, maintaining that generations are not only about the reproduction of social structures but also about change and social transformations. Moreover, by conceiving the term kinship generations, the network intends to take advantage of a productive double connotation: on the one hand, the concept of kinship generations allows for posing questions about how kinship is continually shaped and reshaped in a constantly changing world, all the while generating new meanings about the world. On the other hand, with kinship generations the network seeks to explore what constitutes generations within shifting fields of relatedness and how generations contribute to making and remaking kinship in unpredictable ways. In other words, we are interested in social ‘generativity’ (Bear et al. 2015), which emerges through the interrelation of kinship and generations in correspondence with larger historical, social, economic, and political processes.
Through the proposed network, we seek to enable in-depth exchanges among anthropologists whose work centres on localities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (as well as their corresponding diasporas). Sharing and learning from ethnographic case studies collected in three different geographical regions—which are usually not studied in relation with each other—will create a stimulating atmosphere that accounts for both regional characteristics and global trends. It will encourage network members to think with ‘portable’ research questions about the relevance of kinship and generations.

Cultivating Ethics Across Generations: Translocal Dynamics of Kin Relations in Bangladesh and Northeast India (postdoctoral research project funded by Fritz Thyssen Foundation)

The project "Cultivating Ethics Across Generation" explores the history of one extended family divided by a national border: one half of the family living in Bangladesh and the other in Meghalaya, Northeast India. By examining the history of an extended family through generations, the goal of this project is threefold. First, it aims to gain an understanding of how certain ideas and practices—considered unacceptable in one particular moment of time—turn out to be regarded as normal, good or right. Drawing on the conceptual framework of pragmatism and ‘ordinary ethics’, it is assumed that what is considered normal, good, and right is not static. Instead, these things are prone to change through everyday negotiations and contests. Focusing on intergenerational relationships, particularly everyday social drama—covert and overt tensions—among different age groups, is fruitful as these are situations where such shifts become visible. Second, through the history of the family, this project aims to illustrate how the political and social contexts in which the two families are embedded change over time, thus enabling a comparative understanding of larger historical transformations. Third, moral changes in a family do not occur separately from global reconfigurations. Family events often arise in response to larger normative reshuffling by either emulating or resisting it. Thus, following the ups and downs of a family saga allows one to see how the global and local are knitted into each other in unpredictable ways.

2017-2020
The Price of Belonging (together with Prof. Dr. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka)

The project Price of Belonging offers a new hypothesis in the sense that it insists on viewing belonging not exclusively as a positive social practice but as an ambivalent human endeavour fraught by ideological underpinnings masking its oppressive and, at times, violent tendencies. The project also asserts that belonging and becoming are interdependent, bringing two hitherto separate research fields together. In this way, the project expands the perspective on belonging by shedding light on its negative repercussions as well as its connection to becoming, both of which remain unexplored in the literature until today. The results of the project were published by Brill in 2023 (https://brill.com/display/title/64241).

2012-02 – 2017-08
Land, Life and Emotional Landscapes: Politics of Survival at the Margins of Bangladesh (dissertation)

"Land, Life and Emotional Landscapes: Politics of Survival at the Margins of Bangladesh" is an in-depth ethnographic study based on 24 months of intensive fieldwork. The study analyses the struggles over land in northeastern border regions of Bangladesh from the perspective of small-scale indigenous farmers who have already lost or are threatened with losing their land. Theoretically and empirically the research project is positioned at the intersection of anthropology of violence and anthropology of life working out both the micro manifestations of violence but also the different modalities of agency of the affected farmers and thus shedding light on life under heightened uncertainty. The results of the research were published by Amsterdam University Press in 2022 (https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463721752/land-life-and-emotional-landscapes-at-the-margins-of-bangladesh).

Research areas

• Kinship, Family and Intergenerational Relationships
• Anthropology of Violence
• Anthropology of Living and Dying
• Indigenous Rights
• Land rights and land dispossession

Regional research areas

Bangladesh and North-East India (Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya)

Fieldwork experience

30 months of fieldwork (2010-2022) in Bangladesh and in the borderlands to Tripura, Assam and Meghalaya.