Thomas Widlok

• M.Sc. Ph.D. Prof.
• Professor at University of Cologne

Parallels between person-to-person sharing and centrally institutionalized forms of redistribution have been noted repeatedly but also need to be assessed critically. When sharing is defined as the allocation of economic goods without calculating returns we may ask whether this also includes redistributive large-scale institutions such as forms of...

This collection presents new research on key topics in anthropological linguistics, with a focus on African languages. While Africanist linguists have long been concerned with sociocultural aspects of language structure and use, no comprehensive volume dedicated to the anthropological linguistics of Africa has yet been published. This volume seeks...

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work – we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work – we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...

Zu den Bedingungen der kulturellen Aneignung von Wissen ist zuletzt ein großes öffentliches Interesse entstanden. Ethnologinnen und Ethnologen beschäftigen sich seit Jahrzehnten mit diesem Thema. Sie kennen das Dilemma, dass die eigene Forschungspraxis oft unter Rahmenbedingungen statt?ndet, in denen koloniale und andere Formen der Ausbeutung beste...

For a socio-cultural anthropology of contemporary hunter-gatherers, The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow 2021) provides both good and bad news. It is good news in that it underlines the relevance of hunter-gatherer research for the here and now – beyond early humans and questions of origins. It is bad news insofar as the book proposes that the...

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...

Scale matters. When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the p...

Contrary to the colonial and developmental image that Africa is ‘lagging behind’ and needs to ‘catch up’ with Europe, the more recent position holds that Africa is ‘the future’ in the sense that many ideas and practices that characterize Africa today are foreshadowing processes of a global future at large (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). In many i...

Governance by domination is easy to ‘read’ for political theory, but what about modes of governance that operate without centralised institutions? Such modes of governance are exemplified in the social relations of San in southern Africa. They rely on deictic practices (most fundamentally, pointing and being pointed at) that remain largely under th...

The notion that Africans lack a sense of future was extensively debated following John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) and has since entered the scholarly and popular discourse as a fixed topos which we label #African time (‘Europeans have watches, Africans have time’). The most recent references to the topos are found in future vis...

Körper, Technik und Imagination stehen in einem konstruktiven Zusammenspiel. Besonders deutlich wird dieses komplexe Geflecht beim Erfinden neuer Techniken, die Praktiken ermöglichen, die zuvor nur imaginiert oder geträumt wurden. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes untersuchen sowohl rekursive Prozesse zwischen Körper- und Imaginationstechniken als auc...

Comparative ethnographic research suggests that the creation of co-presence is one of the main strategies for enabling sharing and for demanding a share. Conversely, avoiding or disabling co-presence is a key strategy for dealing with sharing demands. This contribution investigates how shaping the built environment is related to key features of sha...

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 book was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (7FP), TropicMicroArch 623293 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/187754_en.html). The book will be Open Access, thanks to FP7 post-grant Open Access (https://www.openaire.eu/postgrantoapilot).

Riding, hunting, fishing, bullfighting: Human-animal relations are diverse. This anthology presents various case studies of situations in which humans and animals come into contact and asks for the anthropological and philosophical implications of such encounters. The contributions by renowned scholars such as Albert Piette and Kazuyoshi Sugawara p...

Riding, hunting, fishing, bullfighting: Human-animal relations are diverse. This anthology presents various case studies of situations in which humans and animals come into contact and asks for the anthropological and philosophical implications of such encounters. The contributions by renowned scholars such as Albert Piette and Kazuyoshi Sugawara p...

Riding, hunting, fishing, bullfighting: Human-animal relations are diverse. This anthology presents various case studies of situations in which humans and animals come into contact and asks for the anthropological and philosophical implications of such encounters. The contributions by renowned scholars such as Albert Piette and Kazuyoshi Sugawara p...

Riding, hunting, fishing, bullfighting: Human-animal relations are diverse. This anthology presents various case studies of situations in which humans and animals come into contact and asks for the anthropological and philosophical implications of such encounters. The contributions by renowned scholars such as Albert Piette and Kazuyoshi Sugawara p...

Sharing plays a major role in the current rhetoric of imagining alternatives to a world dominated by commodity exchange. The social practice of sharing as described in the ethnographic record has a distinctive profile whereby others are allowed access to something of value without specific obligations of return transfers. As such, sharing can be cl...

Storage covers a wide variety of technological solutions to the problem of how to keep food and other resources available for use. The human ability to store has been a key factor in environmental adaptation and also in the evolution of cultural diversification and complexity. Storage is practiced universally, and it plays an important role in the...

Alternative logics have been invoked periodically to explain the systematically different modes of thought of the subjects of ethnography: one logic for ‘us’ and another for ‘them’. Recently anthropologists have cast doubt on the tenability of such an explanation of difference. In cognitive science, [Stenning and van Lambalgen, 2008] proposed that wi...

The relationship between rationality and action in the domain of space is closely related to the prototypical human action in space, namely, walking. This contribution from social anthropology looks at the prime cognitive challenge in this context: human practical reasoning about movement, the decision to go or to stay. Based on ethnographic work w...

Linealogy: The proposal of a new lifeline for social theory - Ingold Tim , The Life of Lines (London/New York, Routledge 2015) - Volume 57 Issue 3 - Thomas Widlok

This book examines the economy of sharing in a variety of social and political contexts around the world, with consideration given to the role of sharing in relation to social order and social change, political power, group formation, individual networks and concepts of personhood. Widlok advocates a refreshingly broad comparative approach to our u...

Commercial hunters in southern Africa often claim that they have immediate and privileged access to the culture of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups because they share the same subsistence pursuit. In this contribution I challenge these claims on two accounts. First, I highlight that hunting was part and parcel of many different social groups in so...

Die Steinzeit hat einen denkbar schlechten Ruf. Das könnte sich allerdings unter Umständen im Zuge der gegenwärtigen Begeisterung für „Steinzeit-Diäten“ ändern. Auch wer gegen die sogenannte „Hochtechnologie“-Atomkraft ist, bekommt nicht mehr so oft zu hören, dass er oder sie wieder in die Steinzeit zurückwolle. Dem ungeachtet ist es aber unwahrsch...

The San have been the subject of extensive research since the early 20th century, if not longer. Researchers have represented them in various ways, including as a minority people of Southern Africa, as contemporary hunter-gatherers, as an underclass within the regional politico-economic system, and as an indigenous people spread over Southern Afric...

This article provides an outline of a theory of hunter-gatherer mobility that synthesizes a diversity of existing ways of explaining forager mobility. The three approaches considered in detail are optimal foraging Theory, Decision Tree Modelling and Decision Making Pragmatics. The strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are summarized and exam...

Fingerprints, iris-scans, DNA-tests and other biometric technologies are used for making individuals accountable through fixing personal identity to the body. Virtual identities and corporate organizations are used for regulating personal accountability through allowing identities to be independent of the body of individuals. Both sets of technolog...

Cognitive Scientists interested in causal cognition increasingly search for evidence from non-Western Educational Industrial Rich Democratic people but find only very few cross-cultural studies that specifically target causal cognition. This article suggests how information about causality can be retrieved from ethnographic monographs, specifically...

Religion may be one factor that enabled large-scale complex human societies to evolve. Utilizing a cultural evolutionary approach, this chapter seeks explanations for patterns of complexity and variation in religion within and across groups, over time. Properties of religious systems (e.g., rituals, ritualized behaviors, overimitation, synchrony, s...

Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, how...

Sharing adds a paradox to the question of transfer and value: Why do people share what they value even though they cannot count on a return? This contribution breaks with the conventional assumption that practices of sharing are simple prestages of more complex reciprocal gift-exchange or commodity transactions. Instead I consider sharing to be a c...

Sharing adds a paradox to the question of transfer and value: Why do people share what they value even though they cannot count on a return? This contribution breaks with the conventional assumption that practices of sharing are simple prestages of more complex reciprocal gift-exchange or commodity transactions. Instead I consider sharing to be a c...

Current initiatives of digitally archiving ethnographic and linguistic data promise considerable advantages with regard to longevity and accessibility. This article discusses these ‘digital promises’ in the context of projects funded by recent research programs on endangered languages and cultures. It is argued that far from being merely a new tech...

The main goal of this article is to demonstrate the potentials and limitations of mobile eye tracking (MET) in visitor studies and other social science research. We provide empirical examples of MET research in the context of a comparative study of two exhibitions at two museums in Germany. The article underlines the potentials of MET in combinatio...

The African origin of our species has essentially been accepted as a scientific fact, but evolutionary advantages connected with the reasons and circumstances of modern human dispersal remain widely unexplained or controversial. Consequently, this paper provides an overview of the natural and cultural context of earliest AMH (Anatomically Modern Hu...

This article addresses two major challenges for an integrated analysis of socio-environmental systems, namely the diversity of contributing disciplines and the wide spectrum of temporal and spatial scales. Archaeology, the geosciences and socio-cultural anthropology provide information relating to a diversity of specific time series and spatial dis...

A Practice Approach to the Anthropology of Virtue Clearing the Ground: Conceptual Obstacles Virtue in Terms of Artful Agency and Skill Philosophical Considerations The Universality of Virtue and the Particulars of Ethnography Conclusion References

WesselsMichael: Bushman Letters. Interpreting /Xam Narrative. xiii, 330 pp. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010. ISBN 978 1 86814 506 5. - Volume 75 Issue 1 - Thomas Widlok

This chapter explores various Web sites in order to appreciate what the Internet adds to ritual practices, how it changes them, and what conflicts arise when existing rituals are transferred from physical space to cyberspace. The first case examines the function of Australian Aboriginal smoking rituals as ways of belonging and reconciling. The seco...

The separation between ‘settlement’ and ‘landscape’ is deeply entrenched in European thought and also in the worldview of many agrarian societies. In anthropology this is reflected in the distinct development of an anthropology of landscape on the one hand and an anthropology of built forms. The comparative use of permeability maps is introduced in...

This article takes an interdisciplinary route towards explaining the complex history of Haillom culture and language. We begin this article with a short review of ideas relating to 'origins' and historical reconstructions as they are currently played out among Khoekhoe groups in Namibia, in particular with regard to the Haillom. We then take a comp...

This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our...

Even before it became a common place to assume that “the Eskimo have a hundred words for snow” the languages of hunting and gathering people have played an important role in debates about linguistic relativity concerning geographical ontologies. Evidence from languages of hunter-gatherers has been used in radical relativist challenges to the overal...

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The post-colonial constitutions of Namibia (1990) and of South Africa (1996) in principle allow for ‘indigenous’ or ‘customary’ law within the framework set by constitutional law. Developments in recent years, in particular in the course of debates surrounding the reform of inheritance laws, highlight the problems of integrating customary law with...

One of the dilemmas that death creates for the bereaved concerns time. Hertz pointed out that the severance of social ties requires rituals that can stretch the exit- (us) of a deceased person. Following Rappaport, rituals also serve as a means to ‘‘digitalize’’ the analogic protracted process of bodily decay and of forgetting. In this paper I inve...

This chapter provides a practice-oriented approach to ritual, a domain that is usually considered to give only very limited scope to agency. It suggests that in this case, and beyond, a focus on agency provides a productive combination of theorydriven and of data-driven research. This argument is developed with reference to empirical field material...

In the course of the debate about "indigenous rights", it has become clear that indigenous groups, and the anthropologists working with them, are brought into a contradictory position. In the framework of Western civic rights the indigenous rights are operationalized as group rights specifically based on descendency from an aboriginal population. H...

The current process of increasing globalisation, transnationalism and a seeming homogenisation is accompanied by a worldwide trend towards the revitalisation of local traditions, structures, meanings and values, especially in the field of so-called traditional or customary law. This essay introduces the contributions of the special issue The revita...