Michael Schnegg

Verified

Michael verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Michael verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Hamburg University

In Namibia, both Damara pastoralists (ǂNūkhoen) and scientists agree that it rains less frequently than before. To explain their observations, however, scientists refer to carbon dioxide molecules, while the pastoralists point to social tensions, neoliberalism, and failures of the postcolonial state. To understand this discrepancy, I ask whether wh...

To explain cultural diversity, many theories refer to the social construction of reality. In this telling, we frame the world to make it meaningful. In my analysis of what people in Namibia and Germany know about “SARS‐Cov‐2” and “climate change,” I propose an anti‐constructivist alternative. Drawing on the work of the phenomenologist Bernhard Wald...

As a philosophical discipline, phenomenology is interested in how and as what things appear to a subject from the first-person perspective. Phenomenological analyses can be applied to objects, others, the self, feelings and much more. Yet, how do they appear? Within experience! While this is also accepted in anthropology, I show how we can benefit...

This article asks why Namibians complain that rural communities have become ǀowesa (boring) and why they describe a feeling of pointlessness. After Namibia gained independence in 1990, those who migrated to the towns often progressed economically, while those who remained in the rural hinterlands became the spectators of their success. At the same...

Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and co...

Etosha Pan to the Skeleton Coast examines the conservation histories and concerns of one of southern Africa’s most iconic conservation regions: the variously connected ‘Etosha-Kunene’ areas of north-central and north-west Namibia. This cross-disciplinary volume brings together contributions from a Namibian and international group of scholars and co...

Climate research has established a cultural authority in modelling our future with climate change, and often uses a harmful impacts frame to communicate about climate change and climate futures. This paper investigates the social constructions of climate futures by analyzing how the harmful impacts frame resonates and is reframed in three social ar...

The connection between time and worrying is evident in the modern understanding of worrying as a forward-looking present concern. This volume's interdisciplinary contributions furthermore emphasise other relevant relations to the past and the present in this respect, as well as in relation to non-linear conceptions of time. They show, inter alia, t...

Emotionen, Gefühle, affektive Dynamiken: Die Anthropologie der Emotionen hat sich als ein Forschungsfeld etabliert, in dem interdisziplinär gearbeitet wird und das transnational verankert ist. 27 Autor:innen aus Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie, Philosophie, Psychologie, Soziologie, den Neurowissenschaften und der Theaterwissenschaft skizzieren die...

In Namibia, Damara pastoralists share the environment with many beings including elephants, tricksters, and winds. While the importance of other-than-human subjectivity is well established, its methodological, epistemological, and ontological challenges are less settled. To address them, we combine expertise from anthropology and philosophy to ask...

In Namibia, the institutional framework for governing rural water infrastructure has changed profoundly over the last decades. Following a community-based water management (CBWM) strategy, post-independence policies transferred the responsibility for providing water from the state to local user groups. This turned water from a public good into a co...

Our ways of knowing the weather are transforming. Climate change modifies weather patterns, and the globalization of scientific knowledge promotes new ways of making the weather intelligible. Following both transformations, I explore how Damara pastoralists (ǂNūkhoen) in Namibia entertain various Indigenous, religious, political, and scientific exp...

The Damara pastoralists ( ǂnūkhoen) in Namibia distinguish a diverse range of rains. Some rains kill livestock, others care for insects and still others wash away the footprints of the deceased, allowing the person to exist in the spirit realm. While anthropologists have documented cultural classifications like the Namibian rains for decades, we st...

International surveys suggest people increasingly agree the climate is changing and humans are the cause. One reading of this is that people have adopted the scientific point of view. Based on a sample of 28 ethnographic cases we argue that this conclusion might be premature. Communities merge scientific explanations with local knowledge in hybrid...

This article explores why people in Namibia go into debt to eat. Until recently, food sharing practices were maintained by social relationships in which everyone owed everyone else. This made sense, as needs would rotate evenly. However, in recent decades, and largely through state employment and social grants, the political economy has changed. No...

This article introduces ethnographic upscaling, an innovative procedure to explore and test hypotheses drawn from in-depth ethnographic findings in spatially continuous cases. The approach combines the strength of localized ethnographic descriptions with questionnaire-based regional surveys to study the distribution of ethnographic findings across...

A new and important contribution to the re-emergent field of comparative anthropology, this book argues that comparative ethnographic methods are essential for more contextually sophisticated accounts of a number of pressing human concerns today. The book includes expert accounts from an international team of scholars, showing how these methods can...

Ethnologists collect their data “in the field”, i.e. in the living environment of the examined, and not like other scientists in the laboratory, at home or in the library. Field research is the central method of the subject and includes various methods of data collection. The volume conveys basic knowledge of empirical data collection and thus serv...

This article brings the two questions, how and what we know, into a productive dialog to explain the difference between indigenous and scientific environmental knowledge. In the case I explore, scientists and Damara pastoralists (ǂnūkhoen) both relate the arrival of the rains in arid Namibia to the interplay between two winds. However, when it come...

Since the 1990s, access to water has profoundly changed in rural Namibia. The institutional transformation was informed by the then dominant discourse in the global policy debate on water, most importantly the idea of community‐based management (CBM). While the supporters of the development regime promised that it would bring sustainability, econom...

Natural resource management has changed profoundly in recent decades emphasizing new legislation that transfers responsibilities to local user groups. In this article, I follow changing water policies to Namibia and show that the enactment of policy in local institutions deviates from community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) blueprints a...

After independence, and in accordance with global environmental policies, the government of Namibia partly transferred the responsibility for managing wildlife and water to local communities. In this article, we use the concept of environmental justice as a theoretical guide to explore the combined effects that these new policies have had for pasto...

In the final chapter, Betina Hollstein, Wenzel Matiaske, Kai-Uwe Schnapp, and Michael Schnegg relate the new research perspective on networked governance to network governance research as it has developed over the last decades. The authors present a classification of networks as institutions and discuss the relations between actors and networks. Th...

Considering projected climate and socio-economic development for Southern Africa, a major challenge in southern Africa is to find mechanisms to adapt to climate change and to secure water at sufficient quality and quantity for both, human well-being and the stability of ecosystem functions and services. Many countries of southern Africa face inadeq...

Researching cultural diversity is a central subject of social anthropology. 25 authors from institutes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland offer an insight into the subject, its contents and theoretical perspectives. The articles cover a variety of topics: the history of the discipline as well as basic theories and methods, subareas such as busines...

In recent decades, water management in Namibia has profoundly changed. Beginning in the 1990s the Namibian state has incrementally turned ownership of and the responsibility for its rural water supply to local user groups. While the state withdrew from managing resources directly, it continued to circumscribe the ways in which local communities sho...

In this article, I explore food sharing, one of the most salient social practices in rural Namibia. In so doing, I develop a model that situates food on the continuum between private and communal property regimes. I argue that the place it takes is largely shaped by the social costs involved in excluding someone from having a share. Those costs are...

Water governance in rural Namibia has profoundly changed since the early 1990s. After independence and in accordance with global environmental policies, it became a central theme of Namibia's environmental legislation to transfer the responsibility for managing natural resources to local user associations. In this article, I explore the emergence o...

In the course of decentralization, pastoral communities in Namibia have had to find new ways to share their most salient resource, water, and the costs involved in providing it. Using data from sixty communities, we examine (1) whether and to what extent different sharing rules emerge, (2) how variations can be explained, (3) how rules are perceive...

In Namibia, rural water governance has changed profoundly during the last two decades. Today, in many rural communities, user associations administer water and set the rules for management practices. Their rules typically define boundaries and specify contributions that vary for members and outsiders. When the rains failed in 2012-14, the mobility...

Two competing models concerning food transfers prominent in the anthropological literature conceptualize such transfers either as sharing or as exchange. Sharing is understood as situational transactions formed through demands and unconditional giving, whereas reciprocal exchange is understood in terms of networking and keeping score. I propose tha...

It is increasingly recognized that ecosystems provide varied services that should be considered in land management decisions. One of the challenges in the valuation of landscapes is that they often provide multiple services that combine into one social–ecological system. In this article we show how overlaps of those services can be measured, visual...

Sanctions are often considered an important component of successful resource management. To govern water usage, pastoral communities in Namibia have specific sanctions at their disposal and yet these are almost never applied. Interestingly, this does not lead to a breakdown in water supply. To understand collective action in small communities it is...

Defining culture as shared knowledge, values, and practices, we introduce an anthropological concept of culture to the ecosystem-service debate. In doing so, we shift the focus from an analysis of culture as a residual category including recreational and aesthetic experiences to an analysis of processes that underlie the valuation of nature in gene...

Comparison was once the corner stone of anthropology; ethnography later became a way to collect the necessary data and then became a rivaling paradigm. While the ways of doing ethnography have improved significandy over the last decades, comparison has been partly neglected and partly banned in the aftermath of postmodern criticism. At the same tim...

Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity,...

Globalisierung heißt Vernetzung! Wir leben in einer »Netzwerkgesellschaft«, in der Akteure durch Beziehungen in soziale und wirtschaftliche Zusammenhänge eingebettet sind. Ein Ansatz der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, der sich bei der Erforschung dieser Phänomene als weiterführend erwiesen hat, ist die soziale Netzwerkanalyse. Sie erklärt die M...

Dieser Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie die soziale Netzwerkanalyse entstanden ist. Um diese Frage beantworten zu können, muss man definieren, was man unter sozialer Netzwerkanalyse versteht. Freeman hat dazu vier Kriterien vorgeschlagen: (1) die Analyse der sozialen Beziehungen zwischen Akteuren als wichtiger Bestandteil gesellschaftlicher Ordnung...

Die Ethnologie hat einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der sozialen Netzwerkanalyse geleistet (Freeman 2004; Johnson 1994; Mitchell 1974). Das Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es aufzuzeigen, (1) worin dieser Beitrag besteht, (2) welche Fragestellungen Ethnologen heute mit Hilfe der Netzwerkanalyse untersuchen und (3) wodurch sich ihr s...

Was macht Verwandtschaft heute aus? Und welche Fragen und Forschungsfelder werden derzeit diskutiert? In elf Beiträgen präsentiert dieses Buch einführend Ergebnisse aktueller ethnographischer Forschungen.

What is kinship today? And which questions and research fields are currently being discussed? In eleven articles, this book presents the results of current ethnographic research and is devoted to the following topics: foster relationships and exchange relationships; symbolic interaction; inter-ethnic relationships and transcultural kinship; recipro...

What is kinship today? And which questions and research fields are currently being discussed? In eleven articles, this book presents the results of current ethnographic research and is devoted to the following topics: foster relationships and exchange relationships; symbolic interaction; inter-ethnic relationships and transcultural kinship; recipro...

In this chapter we look at discourses – interwoven systems of linguistic and visual symbols and meanings – embedded in the social and political (and economic) field of what has come to be known as the ‘Kashmir conflict’, facilitated and influenced by the globalized technological institution of the Internet, and produced by a variety of local and tr...

Social relations between people seldom follow regular lattice structures. In the Barabási–Albert model nodes link to the existing network structure with a probability proportional to the number of nodes previously attached. Here, we present an anthropologically motivated interpolation between Erdös–Rényi and Barabási–Albert rules, where people also...

Wolf's dichotomy between open and closed corporate communities has become axiomatic for the study of social organization in rural communities in Mesoamerica. In this paper I argue that this dichotomy is of limited use for understanding the vital dynamics behind the evolution of social groups typically classified by anthropologists as peasants. To o...

Research from different parts of Africa indicates that to grasp the HIV/AIDS catastrophe, an in-depth understanding of conjugal relationships is crucial. In casual, short-term sexual interactions, safer sex practices, foremost condom use, have become more and more prevalent. This does not hold true for long-term relationships. Marriage rates have s...

Vulnerability and resilience have emerged as key concepts to link natural and social science approaches to human development. This article deals with local responses to vulnerability in a rural community where long-term ethnographic fi eldwork was carried out. The Richtersveld is characterised by a semi-arid environment. The local economy is mainly...

Research in network science has shown that many naturally occurring and technologically constructed networks are scale free, that means a power law degree distribution emerges from a growth model in which each new node attaches to the existing network with a probability proportional to its number of links (=degree). Little is known about whether th...

Compadrazgo and kinship are two building blocks of the social organisation in rural Latin America. This article describes the compadrazgo system of a rural community in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Whilst compadres were never kin until the middle of the 20th century, today many compadres are chosen among relatives. This institutional change is most clearly ma...

Compadrazgo and kinship are two building blocks of the social organisation in rural Latin America. This article describes the compadrazgo system of a rural community in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Whilst compadres were never kin until the middle of the 20(th) century, today many compadres are chosen among relatives. This institutional change is most clearly...

Cyberguerilleros do not fight alone. Networks and rallying in the Zapatist uprising. Social unrest, uprisings and asymmetrical wars recruit activitists through social networks. This article examines the virtual network which formed around the Zapatist uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The main issue examined here is the structure of the net...

The journal logo illustrates the use of dynamic visualization to complement network and statistical analysis in the study of social, political, economic and historical processes generally. In giving credit to the authors of the logo, this is an invited paper that summarizes earlier work on how existing social networks are transformed into political...

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in t...

Our aim in this chapter is to apply a 'dual inheritance theory' and show how 'emotion universals'-in this case shame-are related to physiological processes and linked to social and behavioural similarities across cultures on the Olle hand and how culture-specific emotions are connected to the learning and coding of specific social and behavioural p...

This chapter deals with the social integration and its boundaries. How is a particular locality integrated? How are social frontiers constructed in a region? How is locality inccribed within the larger economic and sociopolitical spheres? Este capítulo trata sobre fronteras e integración social: ¿De qué manera está integrada socialmente una locali...

This paper presents observations on the personal networks of 91 randomly selected inhabitants of a community in southern California who are linked to 941 associates by social and economic interactions. Over 40% of these relations are with individuals in the same locality, and almost 50% refer to kin. Kin act as trouble-shooters; friends are social...

Cooperation and the emergence of social order are two key problems in the social sciences. This pa-per tests two models (kinship and reciprocity) to explain the selection of sharing partners among the Damara and Nama in Namibia. The second part of the paper deals with the social order that emerges from local exchange rules. Recently network science...

"In den letzten Jahren hat sich in den Naturwissenschaften die Vorstellung durchgesetzt, dass viele natürliche und vom Menschen geschaffene Netzwerke skalenfrei sind, also Potenzgesetzen gehorchen. Diese Überlegungen werden auch auf menschliche Gesellschaften übertragen. Skalenfreie Netzwerke zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass einige Knoten sehr gut v...

'Cooperation and the emergence of social order are two key problems in the social sciences. This paper tests two models (kinship and reciprocity) to explain the selection of sharing partners among the Damara and Nama in Namibia. The second part of the paper deals with the social order that emerges from local exchange rules. Recently network science...