Vol. 87 No. 1 (2026): More than an Anthropology of Crisis. A Festschrift in Honor of Gisela Welz

Gisela Welz has consistently engaged with central themes in cultural anthropology and European ethnology over the long course of her academic career. City, environment, knowledge, globalization, Europeanization – these are just a few of the compendious keywords that her work speaks to. In her engagement with these themes, her ethnographic work demonstrates a particular sensitivity to moments when the ordinary and unremarkable are unsettled by the effects of large-scale changes. Her work confronts a field of tension that, from our perspective, can aptly be described as “More than an Anthropology of Crisis”: transformation, disruption, precarity, contested resources (what we often refer to or perceive as crises today) were always central motifs in the negotiations of the people whose lived realities she studied. However, the concept of crisis was never an analytical starting point for her. Rather, she closely observed how the term gained both academic (“crisis of representation”) and political significance, such as when it was used to legitimize profound changes in Cyprus following the 2008 financial and global economic crisis. Looking back on Gisela Welz’s significant body of work, we take up some of her questions and engage with the “more” of crisis: What exactly happens when phenomena, constellations, and experiences are framed as crisis-ridden? How do people experience change and continuity simultaneously? How can we examine political regulation and local practices of appropriation in their contradictions? What power relations come into play when certain conditions are constructed as crises? What realities does the discourse of crisis itself produce? 

The contributions in this Festschrift build on these questions and explore what it means to understand crisis as a powerful interpretive framework or as lived experience. What unites all of the authors in this Festschrift is their trust in what characterizes Gisela Welz’s work: an intuition for the messy, contradictory processes of change as sources of insight – and the conviction that ethnography can make an invaluable contribution precisely where supposed certainties become fragile. Above all, the contributions argue that ethnographic research must engage and, together with partners beyond the discipline and the academy, weave networks of solidarity. This Festschrift is therefore more than a retrospective on an influential body of work: it is an invitation to continue thinking with Gisela Welz. What might an anthropology look like that, in turbulent times, does not resign but continues to observe, discuss, and co-design?