Anthropology is a comparative science with special interest in non-European cultures. It researches individual cultures, as well as culture as a form of human life in general. Its topics are found in the spaces between the own and the relational other.
The two main areas of focus of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Göttingen University with regards to research, education and the Ethnographic Collection are the Indo-Pacific - especially Oceania and Southeast Asia - and Africa. The Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology investigates problem-oriented topics of present importance against the background of current and international theoretical discussions of the discipline. This includes the exemplary research of various articulations of cultural continuity and discontinuity, diversity, and identity in selected postcolonial societies of Africa and the Indo-Pacific.
In addition, students and staff have access to an expansive collection of approximately 17,000 ethnographic objects mainly from Oceania and Africa (Ethnographic Collection, Theaterplatz 15).
Scientists and their research projects:
