Tasks and Aims
The Institute for Social Anthropology is an Asia-specialized research institute at the AAS. Its long-term research focus lies on "Consensus and Conflict in Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean". Special emphasis is placed on transnational developments in Asia, such as regional integration and cooperation, transformations of family and kinship relations, as well as regional and internal migration. ISA’s medium-term research program (2021-2023) is entitled “Uncertainties and Inequalities: Engaging with Asian Movements in the Present and Past ”. This research program directs ISA’s focus to Asian social, cultural, political and religious movements, as well as movements of people, knowledge, and objects in, through and from Asia. It further develops ISA’s previous research agenda between 2012 and 2020, which dealt with “crisis, mobility and transformation”. By emphasizing uncertainties and inequalities, which are powerfully connected with contemporary crises and movements (from environmental crises and pandemics to migration, economic development, and various religious and political movements), this research program covers some of socio-cultural anthropology’s core concerns. As critical guiding orientations, the key concepts of uncertainty, inequality, and movements are empirically applied in and across ISA’s three main regions of research: the Middle East, Tibetan/Mongolian regions and Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Islands of the Indian Ocean. They pertain to both contemporary and historic times, and carry particular potential for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities, social and life sciences. Prof. Regina Bendix is the current chair of ISA’s Scientific Advisory Board for the term 2018-2021.History and Structure
The roots of the current Institute for Social Anthropology can be traced back to March 2, 1938, when the erstwhile Commissions for "Research on Illiterate Languages of Non-European Peoples" and for "Publishing Songs and Texts Recorded in Prisoner of War Camps" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences were merged into the new "Commission for Research on Primitive Cultures and Languages." As the Commission’s research focus increasingly turned to complex societies, in line with developments within anthropology at the time, it was renamed "Ethnological Commission" on November 22, 1961. In the years between 1955 and 1965, Prof. Robert Heine-Geldern established a focus on the region of Southeast Asia for the first time in the history of AAS. From 1980 to 2000 Prof. Walter Dostal substantially expanded the already existing focus on Southeast Asia by two additional core fields – South-Western Arabia and Tibet. A second institutional merger took place under Prof. Walter Dostal on January 1, 1993, when the "Arabic Commission" was integrated into the Ethnological Commission, resulting both in an interdisciplinary approach that provided a strong foundation for research on intercultural relations, and in a special emphasis on language competency in its anthropological work. As it became clear that the term "ethnos" did not adequately capture anthropology’s research focus on the human anymore, the Commission for Ethnology was renamed, on January 18, 1995, to "Commission for Social Anthropology." Since 1995, this socio-anthropological research approach follows an interdisciplinary program by conducting empirical and ethnographic investigations in connection with philological and historical analyses and intercultural comparative studies of socio-cultural phenomena. The award of thRegional foci
ISA’s regional foci and expertise encompass: 1) the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, 2) primarily Buddhist Central Asia and the Tibetan language-speaking Himalayan regions, as well as 3) Southeast Asia and the islands of the Indian Ocean. Researchers on the Middle East examine, inter alia, social transformations and conflicts of South-Western Arabia past and present and the memory of crimes against humanity among Kurdish people. In Central Asia, Tibet and the Himalayan region, staff carry out research on imperial-time and early Buddhist Tibet, Tibetan medicine, material culture, mobility, nomadism and memory. Ongoing projects in the region of Southeast Asia and the islands of the Indian Ocean range between the role of social media in religious practices, health-related tourism, the nexus of gender and economy in mainland Southeast Asia, environmental frictions, mobilities, and peace movements. Methodologically, ISA pursues gender-sensitive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in local languages and systematic cross-cultural comparison in its analyses and interpretations of socio-cultural processes in the past and present.Events
Since 2002, ISA has co-organized the internationaPublications
Since 1996, ISA publishes the book seriesReferences
External links
* * * {{authority control Austrian Academy of Sciences Research institutes in Austria Organisations based in Vienna Anthropology