Birgitt Röttger-Rössler is full professor of social and cultural anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin and director of the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies. Dynamics of Sociality in a World in Motion” at Freie Universität Berlin. Besides this she acts as head of the research unit “Anthropology of Emotion” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her latest research is directed on childhood, socialization, parenting and schooling; her regional focus is on Southeast Asian societies. She conducted several years of fieldwork, mainly in Indonesia. Her current research projects deal with the socialization of emotions in cross-cultural comparison and with the formation of feeling in the transnational social field of Vietnamese Berlin.

Roundtable “Cultural Diversity?”

 29th May 01.00 – 02.30 pm | Monique Scheer, Boris Nieswand, Michael Boiger, Thomas Stodulka, Moderation: Birgitt Röttger Rössler

 In contemporary academic writings the term culture, which is not only central to anthropology but also to the social and cultural sciences in general, increasingly appears only in word compositions such as “cultural plurality/multiplicity/variety”, “cultural diversity”, “cultural heterogeneity”, or “multiplicity of cultural orientations”, “diversity of social and cultural backgrounds” etc.

The roundtable provides a platform to discuss what these adjectival collocations denote precisely? Provocatively, it asks whether culture as adjectival becoming has transfigured into a leftover-category that lumps together the conceptually uncanny and empirically enigmatic? Invited scholars from sociology, social and cultural anthropology, cultural psychology and cultural studies will critically debate the analytical value of the terms “culture” and “diversity” and their entanglements from different disciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, they will pay attention to the affective dimensions of living in “culturally diverse settings”.