Institut für Ethnologie
20.05.25: Vortrag im Ethnologischen Kolloquium von Olaf Zenker
15. Mai 2025, von Christina Fastner
Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) zum Thema:
Towards a New Anthropology of Justice in the Anthropocene
This paper, co-authored with Anna-Lena Wolf, is animated by the central intuition that the promising development of a new anthropology of justice and the important contemporary debates about the Anthropocene should be brought into closer conversation with each other. The talk discusses some of the potentials and pitfalls of new anthropological approaches to justice, proposing its own analytical definition of justice as the precondition for ethnographically studying multiple notions of justice. The paper then engages debates of the Anthropocene and problematises implicit notions of an undifferentiated humanity as a global homogenous actor allegedly responsible for anthropogenic and anthropocenic environmental crises. Against this backdrop, it elaborates on how the new anthropology of justice and debates about the Anthropocene can each profit from insights of the respective other field. The talk ends with normatively arguing for “anthropological (re)turns”: while internally disassembling and pluralising the idea of a global human subject through a multidimensional justice-lens, we remain committed to a meaningful and relevant conception of “anthropos” – the human as an indispensable category of analysis and action at the moment of its alleged conceptual demise and potential self-caused extinction in the Anthropocene.
Wir freuen uns sehr auf den Vortrag, zu dem wir alle interessierten Personen herzlich einladen.
Das Kolloquium findet immer dienstags im großen Seminarraum des Instituts statt:
Institut für Ethnologie
Seminarraum 222, 2. OG
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Westflügel
20146 Hamburg