News Archive

Dr. Hatem Elliesie, long-time Group Leader in the Department ‘Law & Anthropology’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, accepted an appointment as Professor for Islamic Law at Leipzig University on 1 August 2024. We talked with him about his new responsibilities and his research and teaching plans. more

Sleep is a fragile state. It is easily disrupted and does not come at our bidding. For even though we can try to create ideal conditions for getting sufficient restful sleep, it cannot be consciously controlled. Because there is no intentional action by which we can will ourselves to sleep, sleep disorders are all the more distressing. Consequently, getting to the bottom of the various types and causes of disturbed sleep has long been an important concern in medicine and related fields. Today, this is often studied with the help of sleep labs. But do they actually work? We talked with Julia Vorhölter about her research in German sleep labs and about the particular atmosphere of a space where the private and intimate realm of sleep meets technological diagnostic equipment. more

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology will present their project Re-mind the ‘Nearby’ at the storytelling evening of Volkshochschule Leipzig on Friday, 6 September between 16:30 and 20:00. The photos and audio recordings bring to life the experiences of migrant women from Eritrea, Syria, the Sudan, and Ukraine as they talk about arriving and settling in Halle and how they have created a new nearby far from their homelands. The stories are in English and German. The event is free and open to the public. more

Why are there so many UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Saxony-Anhalt, but very few in Asia and Africa? What is a good night's sleep and how can we measure it? How does our culture influence the practice of organ donation? How do courts deal with behaviors that do not conform to our ideas of "normal"? What has the phasing out of lignite-fired power generation in the Central German mining area done to the people who live there? Social Anthropologists will provide answers to these five questions at Science Night on Friday, July 5, starting at 5 p.m. in the Melanchthonianum, lecture hall D, on Uniplatz in Halle. more

On 3 June 2024, past and present Institute members and guests from science and politics convened at the MPI for Social Anthropology in Halle to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding. Opening the festivities, Head of Research Group Christoph Brumann und Director Ursula Rao took the audience through an entertaining retrospective of the past 25 years. The afternoon was dedicated to a panel discussion on the question “Does Transformation Need Science?” featuring Minister Armin Willingmann and Mayor Egbert Geier along with Ursula Rao, Christine Sattler of the Freiwilligen-Agentur Halle, and Professor Patrick Jahn from MLU Halle. more

Interview with Head of Research Group Mareike Schmidt more

What happens when anthropologists spend months in a foreign place, immersing themselves in the lives of others? Where does their research take them and what insights does it bring? In the exhibition “Wechsel Deine Perspektive – Ethnologie öffnet Türen”, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (MPI) and the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg open doors into their work. The exhibition will be on display from 17 April to 7 July 2024 in the main building of the university (Löwengebäude, Universitätsplatz 11). It is open Wed–Sun between 13:00 and 18:00; admission is free. more

On 1 February 2024, Biao Xiang, Director of the Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’, begins his term as Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI). He takes over from Ursula Rao, who has performed this function since 1 February 2022. more

Paralleljustiz – reliance on “parallel” justice to resolve conflicts – is often invoked as a threat to the rule of law in Germany. But does such an informal system of extrajudicial justice in disregard of state norms even exist? This is one of the questions that will be addressed at the conference “Konfliktregulierung in Deutschlands pluraler Gesellschaft: ‘Paralleljustiz’?” on 1 December 2023 in Harnack House in Berlin. Researchers from the MPI for Social Anthropology will present the results of their fieldwork in immigrant communities and state institutions and discuss their findings with representatives of the ministries of justice of Berlin, Bremen, and North Rhine-Westphalia. A publication based on the conference papers is planned for the first half of 2024. more

Interview with IMPRS coordinator Patrick Desplat more