More than an Anthropology of Crisis

On the Simultaneity of Persistence and Change in the Work of Gisela Welz

Abstract

This introduction to the Festschrift honors the scholarly work of Gisela Welz, cultural anthropologist and long-time director of Frankfurt’s Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology. In her research, she combines a critical analysis of the contemporary with historical depth. In her detailed ethnographic analyses, she takes account of the simultaneity of persistence and change in everyday practices and traces their translocal interrelations. Drawing on her ethnographic studies and key contributions to the development of the discipline, her work serves here as a starting point to examine crisis discourses from a critical anthropological perspective. To this end, we have invited colleagues and companions of Gisela Welz to expand on these perspectives through their own contributions. These analyze crises as regimes of knowledge and cultural constructions from an ethnographic perspective (Hodžić; Acksel & Eitel), develop positions for solidarity-based and collaborative scholarly practice (Binder & Hess; Dilger), and explore new epistemological approaches and spaces of possibility (Lemke; Barry; Niewöhner). In this way, the contributions both honor Welz’s work and ask how anthropology today can navigate between crisis analysis, scholarly practice, and the search for the possible. Together with the contributors, we advocate for an anthropology that does not reproduce crisis discourses but rather makes their contradictions visible and productive for a better understanding of societal transformations.