Johannes Lenhard

Farhan Samanani

How are notions of ‘home’ made and negotiated by ethnographers? And how does the researcher relate to forms of home encountered during fieldwork? Rather than searching for an abstract, philosophical understanding of home, this collection asks how home gains its meaning and significance through ongoing efforts to create, sustain or remake a sense of home. The volume explores how researchers and informants alike are always involved in the process of making and unmaking home, and challenges readers to reimagine ethnographic practice in terms of active, morally complex process of home-making. Contributions reach across the globe and across social contexts, and the book includes chapters on council housing and middle-class apartment buildings, homelessness and migration, problems with accessing the field as well as limiting it, physical as well as sentimental notions of home, and objects as well as inter-human social relations. Home draws attention to processes of sociality that normally remain analytically invisible, and contributes to a growing and rich field of study on the anthropology of home.

Ethnographic Encounters

Home

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy - Science, Theory, Anthropology, grade: 69, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: Modern money is not easily captured. Some accounts even claim that its defining feature is its quality as a universal leveller and yardstick (see Maurer, 2006:16). This quality, however, is exactly what we want to debate. Without being confined to a particular conceptualisation of 'modern money' as a means of payment, a store of value and a unit of account, I want to approach money as such in its various forms in traditional (nonmodern) contexts and our own 'credit-money'-bank form. The question is what effect a money has: does it flatten, commensurate and homogenise? Is it true that "when monetary exchange is anonymous and anonymizing, the social identities of transacting parties are irrelevant to the value of the objects mediated by money ... and so the things take on the powers of the fetish" (Maurer, 2006:23)? As the following discussion shows, you can indeed find examples for this flattening function of money. Not only does Marx explicitly focus on this negative, fetishised - i.e. concealed - quality of money as 'confuser', but Bohannan (1959) finds this effect of modern money on the Tiv economy in Nigeria. Kwon's (2007) analysis of Vietnamese ghost money generally agrees with Bohannan - but introduces a more balanced view on money's cultural meanings and potential problems of human agency and performativity as opposed to seeing it as an inherent quality. Simmel's other side of money's potential effect - increased freedom and a new form of relation - are brought into the debate with Cole's (2005) account of transactional sex in Madagascar partly building on Hutchinson's (1992) fieldwork among the Nuer. Money should not be seen through the eyes of Western folk tales (Maurer, 2006:19) but in its culturally specific context. Money is not one-sided but its effects depend on where it is used by whom in what kind of practice

The Fetishism to Credit Money with an Intrinsic Power to Change ('Invert') Society and Culture

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy - Science, Theory, Anthropology, grade: 69, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: Modern money is not easily captured. Some accounts even claim that its defining feature is its quality as a universal leveller and yardstick (see Maurer, 2006:16). This quality, however, is exactly what we want to debate. Without being confined to a particular conceptualisation of ‘modern money’ as a means of payment, a store of value and a unit of account, I want to approach money as such in its various forms in traditional (nonmodern) contexts and our own ‘credit-money’-bank form. The question is what effect a money has: does it flatten, commensurate and homogenise? Is it true that “when monetary exchange is anonymous and anonymizing, the social identities of transacting parties are irrelevant to the value of the objects mediated by money ... and so the things take on the powers of the fetish” (Maurer, 2006:23)? As the following discussion shows, you can indeed find examples for this flattening function of money. Not only does Marx explicitly focus on this negative, fetishised – i.e. concealed – quality of money as ‘confuser’, but Bohannan (1959) finds this effect of modern money on the Tiv economy in Nigeria. Kwon’s (2007) analysis of Vietnamese ghost money generally agrees with Bohannan – but introduces a more balanced view on money’s cultural meanings and potential problems of human agency and performativity as opposed to seeing it as an inherent quality. Simmel’s other side of money’s potential effect – increased freedom and a new form of relation – are brought into the debate with Cole’s (2005) account of transactional sex in Madagascar partly building on Hutchinson’s (1992) fieldwork among the Nuer. Money should not be seen through the eyes of Western folk tales (Maurer, 2006:19) but in its culturally specific context. Money is not one-sided but its effects depend on where it is used by whom in what kind of practice. Marx account is merely one part of this story – the one that now has become exactly that, a Western folk tale.

The Fetishism to Credit Money with an Intrinsic Power to Change (‘Invert’) Society and Culture

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: 1.7, Royal Holloway, University of London, language: English, abstract: Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan being the wars discussed most controversial in the last decade are also an important subject matter for the political theory (Kugler et al., 2004; Mearsheimer/Walt, 2003). Especially their use as falsifying cases against the liberal notion of democratic peace theory is prominent – though questionable (Panke/Risse, 2007). Kant and his successors in the tradition of the liberal democratic peace theory can to a certain extent be defended even considering the recent wars – at east on the surface; these were fought between despotic states and democracies and therefore do not stand in opposition to the liberal peace theory in its ‘narrow form’. Nevertheless, closer analysis reveals that the recent conflicts can be used as examples of severe violations of part of Kant’s predictions and arguments. These arguments will be exposed within the first part of the essay formulated by Immanuel Kant already in 1795 (Kant, 2007). Afterwards the theoretical discussion will be expanded towards contemporary followers, such as Doyle (1983). They form what is often stated as the liberal democratic peace theory. Subsequently, the cases of Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan as possible points of falsifications against the trustworthiness of the theoretical arguments presented beforehand will be analysed.

Kant and the Liberal Democratic Peace Theory - the Cases of Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Art - Installation / Action/Performance Art / Modern Art, grade: 1.3, Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, language: English, abstract: The core of my term paper is based on two issues. The concept of an “art laboratory” in general and its application on Warhol and Warhols factory. In the first part of my paper, I try to develop the idea of a laboratory. I start with the common sense interpretation of the laboratory in the natural sciences. Afterwards I try to employ different theories taken from the cultural sciences to develop the term for my intention. Bourdieu, Becker, Knorr Cetina and others designed concepts to fill the laboratory idea used by Dragicevic Sesic and Dragojevic with life and in the end of the first part of my paper, I will have an idea of the “art laboratory” which can be used to describe Warhols factory and evaluate its policies in the 1960s. In the next chapter, I will first introduce Warhol and his life in a short introduction. After this, I will describe in a very short paragraph the development oft the art scene in New York in the 1950s and 1960s before I come to describe the factory as Warhol ́s studio and working place and as a meeting point for the new york boheme and scene, as the venue in the 1960s New York. In the last chapter interwoven with the description, I will cope with Warhol ́s policies and with its major aims and tasks prospective power and aesthetics. Especially the concept of avantgarde is a major topic in this cahpter. In a final paragraph, a short recapitulation and reflexion will be done and I will come up with an evaluation of the concept of the “art laboratory” and its appliance to Warhol ́s factory.

Warhols Factory - A Laboratory

Martin Carrier

This book puts forward a new role for mathematics in the natural sciences. In the traditional understanding, a strong viewpoint is advocated, on the one hand, according to which mathematics is used for truthfully expressing laws of nature and thus for rendering the rational structure of the world. In a weaker understanding, many deny that these fundamental laws are of an essentially mathematical character, and suggest that mathematics is merely a convenient tool for systematizing observational knowledge. The position developed in this volume combines features of both the strong and the weak viewpoint. In accordance with the former, mathematics is assigned an active and even shaping role in the sciences, but at the same time, employing mathematics as a tool is taken to be independent from the possible mathematical structure of the objects under consideration. Hence the tool perspective is contextual rather than ontological. Furthermore, tool-use has to respect conditions like suitability, efficacy, optimality, and others. There is a spectrum of means that will normally differ in how well they serve particular purposes. The tool perspective underlines the inevitably provisional validity of mathematics: any tool can be adjusted, improved, or lose its adequacy upon changing practical conditions.

Johannes Lenhard

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