Stephan on Anthropology

Anthropology developed out of the interest for the exotic, for the different, for the other. It was a colonial science serving the task to integrate, to develop, and to administer people that are considered to be behind of development, peripheral and disappearing. At the same time anthropology started to undermine its own standpoint but challenging the very notions of the developed and the civilised. Its interest in the niches, the ”outdated”, the ”primitive”, the ”dying out” leads to an understanding of the power relations that construct these categories.

Anthropological Questions

Why people persist to be different in a globalising world? How is state bureaucracy and science involved into categorising and differentiating people and how do people counteract? How are anthropologists able to understand people that lead a fundamentally different lifestyle then they do? - What are the preconditions to understand people that live different from your own? How does the social and cultural background of a scientist influence his way to see other people? How the researcher can become able to move her standpoint, to make it fluid in order to develop the skill to see the world with different eyes?