Category Archives: Theorie und Praxis des interdisziplinären Kuratierens

Lecture series “Beziehungsweise Familie” (Family Matters) – May 28, 2025 with Aparecida Vilaça

On May 28, 2025 at 18:00 we invite you to the next date of the lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters):

Becoming kin: the making of kinship in Indigenous Amazonia
Prof. Dr. Aparecida Vilaca (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social Museu Nacional, São Paulo)

In this lecture, Prof. Dr. Aparecida Vilaça intends to discuss, based on her personal experience recounted in the book Paletó and Me. Memories of my Indigenous Father (Stanford 2021), how Amazonian indigenous peoples conceive of kinship not as something given from biological relationships, but to be produced in perpetuity through acts of care and recognition.

The lecture will be held in English.

Participation is possible without pre-registration and is open to all interested parties.

Organiser:

Prof Dr Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Dr Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Dr Laura Goldenbaum (Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace)

Place and time:

28 May 2025,

6 to 8 pm

in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor,
Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.

Further information

Plakat Ringvorlesung Beziehungsweise Familie
Portrait Aparecida Vilaça

Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology/MuseuNacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a researcher for the National Science Research Council (CNPq). Since 1986 she works among the Wari’ Indians of South-Western Amazonia, Brazil. Her fieldwork has been financed by the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She was Professeur Invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1999, Directeur d’Études Invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the same city in 2000, Visiting Professor of the Centre of Latin American Studies of the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2001 and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Social Anthropology at the same University in 2004.

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Lecture series “Beziehungsweise Familie” (Family Matters) – May 14, 2025 with Janet Carsten

On May 14, 2025 at 18:00 we invite you to the next date of the lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters):

The Creativity of Kinship
Prof. Dr. Janet Carsten (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh)

This lecture questions conventional understandings of the family by reflecting on the imaginative, ethical, and creative qualities of everyday kinship over time – qualities that are often ignored by social scientists. Rather than constituting a realm of conservatism and normativity, as is generally assumed, I instead propose a historically nuanced understanding of kinship and relatedness that has change and transformation at its core. Here I revisit themes from my work over several decades, including research in a Malay village in the early 1980s, a study of adoptees’ searches for birth kin in Scotland, later urban research in hospital blood banks and clinical pathology labs in Penang and, most recently, work on the texture of marital lives in the ethnically and culturally diverse world of contemporary Penang in Malaysia. I consider the ways in which ethical imagination, care and creativity expand the seemingly closed, conventional bounds of kinship. Searches for birth kin undertaken by adoptees expand their horizons of familial relations, demanding ethical reflection about family relations and about the constitution of the self. Marriage draws new elements into the heart of kinship, and is a source of change and renewal under the persuasive guise of continuity and convention. It requires a constant process of adjustment and accommodation – or refusal of accommodation – to a spouse and their relatives. Selectively and cumulatively, intimate familial processes of ethical imagination constitute and enable political transformation. These processes, I argue, are at the heart of the generativity and creativity of kinship, and its contribution to historical and political change.

The lecture will be held in English.

Participation is possible without pre-registration and is open to all interested parties.

Organiser:

Prof Dr Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Dr Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Dr Laura Goldenbaum (Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace)

Place and time:

14 May 2025,

6 to 8 pm

in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor,
Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.

Further information

Plakat Ringvorlesung Beziehungsweise Familie
Portrait Janet Carsten

Prof. Dr. Janet Carsten is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.  Her research focuses on the anthropology of kinship with particular reference to Malaysia and Britain; it encompasses domestic relations, gender, historical migration, the house, adoption reunions, and kinship and memory. She has worked on ideas about bodily substance, and the interface between popular and medical ideas about blood in Malaysia and Britain.  Janet Carsten is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Member of Academia Europaea. She has recently held an ERC Advanced Grant to examine contemporary transformations of marriage in global perspective. Among other works, she is the author of After Kinship (2004) and Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang (2019).

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Lecture series “Beziehungsweise Familie” (Family Matters) – April 30, 2025 with Nadja-Christina Schneider

On April 30, 2025 at 18:00 we invite you to the next date of the lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters):

Family and other forms of cohabitation in urban India
Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften)

Nadja-Christina Schneider’s presentation will examine the extent to which housing planning in India has changed in recent decades to accommodate new social and demographic developments. Although the trend, especially in larger cities, is clearly moving towards housing forms for smaller family units, multi-generational households continue to exist. A rapidly growing market has also emerged for age-appropriate housing and care facilities. Households and communal living are still closely associated with the ‘family living model’, particularly from a state perspective. Does this in turn offer room for alternative forms of family and kinship alongside heteronormative extended and nuclear families? And conversely, how accepted are individual or communal forms of living that deliberately do not define themselves in terms of family or kinship? The lecture will take a closer look at these questions using selected examples.

The lecture will be held in German.

Participation is possible without pre-registration and is open to all interested parties.

Organiser:

Prof Dr Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Dr Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Dr Laura Goldenbaum (Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace)

Place and time:

30 April 2025,

6 to 8 pm

in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor,
Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.

Further information

Plakat Ringvorlesung Beziehungsweise Familie
Nadja-Christina Schneider

Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider is a South Asian Studies scholar and teaches as a professor at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at HU Berlin. The results of her research on family, reproduction and housing in India can be found in the two book publications ‘Reimagining Housing, Rethinking the Role of Architects in India’ (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2024)(open access) and ‘Family Norms and Images in Transition. Contemporary Negotiations of Reproductive Labour, Love and Relationships in India (ed. with Fritzi-Marie Titzmann)(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020).

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