Dear President of the FU Berlin, dear Prof. Ziegler,
dear Vice Presidents,
We, the Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), are shocked to learn that the professorship for ‘Psychological Anthropology’ at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin has been proposed for cancellation as part of the Berlin Senate’s budget cuts.
It is appalling that the FU is considering cutting an internationally renowned and successful institute of our discipline in a way that jeopardises its existence.
The degree programmes in Berlin are among the largest in our field in Germany and train doctoral candidates and early career researchers for the whole of Europe. If the high-performing Berlin institute were to lose one of its three professorships, it would be forced to drastically reduce the number of doctoral students and guest researchers, which would have an impact on all of Europe.
The Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology provides its students with a sound education in ethnographic field research, differentiated regional knowledge of East Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America and disciplinary expertise on issues such as migration, gender, culture, health and museum work. The Berlin Institute also makes a central contribution to collection research in the unique institutional environment of the Dahlem Research Campus and the Humboldt Forum.
The Collaborative Research Centre ‘Affective Societies’, which has been under the auspices of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology since 2015 and has raised around 30 million euros since its launch, is a flagship of international research in the field of affect and emotion research. To us, it seems paradoxical to cut a professorship that played a foundational role in establishing this highly successful centre and that has also significantly contributed to the training of graduate and postgraduate students in this field of research.
In times of rising right-wing extremism and an increasing hostility towards science, Social and Cultural Anthropology is immensely important. It offers a unique approach to understanding the diversity of human ways of living and the complexities of our globalized world. This perspective is particularly important in the context of Berlin, a hub for scholarly discussions on all these issues among scholars in Germany and internationally. At this critical time the cancellation of professorships in Social and Cultural Anthropology is therefore the wrong signal!
Against this background, we are writing to appeal to you not to cancel the professorship for Psychological Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Sincerely,
Dr. Hayal Akarsu
President, EASA
On behalf of the Executive Committee of EASA
