Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Bereich Sozialanthropologie (AG Pfaff), Projektleiterin “Cultivating Ethics across Generations” (CEAG)”
Koordinatorin des Netzwerks "Shaping Asia"
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im DFG-Projekt “Shaping Asia: Knowledge Production and Circulation” - Projektleitung: Prof. Dr. em. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka
Academic Education
2017-08-28
Defense of the doctoral dissertation (summa cum laude)
2012-02 – 2017-08
Doctoral studies in Social Anthropology, Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany
2009-04 – 2011-07
Master of Arts in Sociology (major in Social Anthropology), Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
2007-04 – 2009-03
Bachelor of Arts in Sociology (major in Social Anthropology), Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
2002-09 – 2004-10
Study of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary
1995-10 – 1996-08
Journalism (major Investigative Journalism), Ady Endre College for Journalism, Nagyvárad, Romania
Professional Career
2025-2028
PI "Kinship Generations" (together with Dr. Magdalena Suerbaum, project funded by DFG)
2023-2025
PI "Cultivating Ethics across Generations" (project funded by Fritz Thyssen Foundation)
2022-04-06
Visiting lecturer at Kathmandu University and Tribhuvan University, Nepal
2019-10 – 2024
Coordinator in the Research Network Shaping Asia
2020-04 – 2024
Research associate in the project “Knowledge Production and Circulation” of the Shaping Asia Research Network, led by Prof. Dr. Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka
2017-10 – today
Research associate and lecturer at the Research Group Social Anthropology, Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
2018-10 – 2019-03
Post-doctoral fellow at the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies “Metamorphoses of the Political: Comparative Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century” (ICAS-MP), an Indo-German research cooperation funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, New Delhi, India
2017-03
Visiting lecturer at Kathmandu University, Nepal
2013-03 – 2017-03
Research collaborator and lecturer at the Research Group Social Anthropology, Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
2011-03 – 2014-03
Research collaborator in the research project “Micro dynamics of political communication in the World Society. The Social Life of the Democracy Concept in Bangladesh and Senegal”, funded by DFG, Research Group Social Anthropology, Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
2010-02 – 2011-01
Student assistant in the research project “Ethnicization and De-Ethnicization of Politics. Media, Actors and Semantics of Ethnicity in Transnational Communicative Space”, funded by DFG, Research Group Social Anthropology, Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University
2001-09 – 2003-01
Project manager of regional development projects for the Ministry of Economy and Traffic as well as the Department for Information Systems of the Prime Minister’s Office, Regionális Fejlesztési Holding RT., Budapest
1996-09 – 2000-08
Independent reporter
Grants and third party funds
Memberships
2017 - today
Member of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial und Kulturanthropologie
2014 - today
Member of the Royal Anthropological Institute
2013 - today
Member of the European Association for South Asian Studies
2013 - today
Member of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
2013 - today
Member of the American Anthropological Association
Languages
Hungarian (mother tongue); English (fluent); German (fluent); Romanian (good reading and writing command); Bengali (basics), War-Khasi (basics), Hindi
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
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.