Institute for Social Anthropology


The Institute for Social Anthropology is a research institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria.

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 is entitled “Crisis, Mobility and Transformation: Pursuing and elaborating qualitative anthropological research and methods for the past and the present”. It focuses on systemic and biographic crises in Asia’s past and present, on the relationships between crises and mobility, and on the role of major social, economic, religious and political transformations in connection with this.
Prof. Regina Bendix is the current chair of ISA’s Scientific Advisory Board for the term 2019-2020.

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 the to Prof. Andre Gingrich in the year 2000 marked the start of a new era at the Commission.
On January 1, 2007, the "Commission for Social Anthropology" was transformed into a Research Unit as part of the "Center for Studies in Asian Cultures and Social Anthropology," and awarded temporary institutional status as the "Institute for Social Anthropology" on January 1, 2010. Following a successful external evaluation, it was granted permanent status on September 15, 2011. In 2019, Andre Gingrich retired, and Stephan Kloos took over as interim director.
Today, the Institute for Social Anthropology constitutes one of the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ flagship institutes in the humanities and social sciences, and counts among the top European research institutions in anthropology.

Regional 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 include research on health-related mobility and tourism in the Republic of Maldives, on Islamic movements and the nexus of Buddhism, gender and economy in mainland Southeast Asia, on learning, planning and imagining in rural and urban Southeast Asia, and on social media and Islamic practices in Indonesia.
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 international in collaboration with the of the University of Vienna and the . Every year, a prominent representative of the discipline is invited to hold a public lecture. Since 2004, the Eric Wolf Lectures are published in .
About eight times a year, the institute organizes its ISA International Guest Lectures, for which ISA invites researchers from all relevant fields and well-established lecturers. These lectures – mainly in English – are published in the institute’s working papers in Social Anthropology.
Every two years, ISA organizes an "International Anthropological Atelier" – a special workshop together with another European anthropological institute in order to share, discuss, and develop preliminary results of ongoing research. The outcomes of the workshop are published as an edited volume or a special focus section in a leading journal of the field.
ISA’s Research Forum is meant primarily as an internal forum for staff members of ISA or partner institutions to present new projects as well as the results of ongoing or already completed research.
Occasionally, ISA organizes or co-organizes domestic as well as international conferences and seminars on theoretical-methodological debates, special topics, or regional agendas. In 2004, ISA co-organized the , in 2011 the , and in 2015 the as well as the in Vienna.

Publications

Since 1996, ISA publishes the book series "". This series is available from the .
Since 2008, AAS Working Papers in Social Anthropology appear several times a year. This series is available online and open access on the institute’s homepage.
Another publication is the book series "", which is also available from the .