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While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to "map the margins" (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the life of Viktor von Weizsäcker (VvW, 1886–1957), a German medical doctor, philosopher and founder of the Heidelberg School of Anthropological Medicine, from a psychobiographical and salutogenic perspective. The authors use salutogenesis and sense of coherence (SOC), and take crucial cultural, historical, and socio-structural frameworks into account to explore the life during the 19th and 20th Centuries in Germany. They present the exploration of a strong SOC in the life of VvW and show how SOC is created within the tight family bonds of the family clan, which has produced many extraordinary theologists, philosophers, scientists and politicians over six generations. In a complex, interconnected and holistic way, SOC is evident in von VvW's individual life, and is also shown to be a family resource. This article contributes to psychobiography in three ways: it develops the salutogenetic perspective in psychobiography, explores the life of VvW within a specific sociocultural context, and investigates the life from a salutogenetic and socio-cultural perspective. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and recommendations for theory and practice are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early history of anthropology in eighteenth-century Germany wove together contributions from medicine, metaphysics, and a host of other disciplines in an attempt to develop a holistic ‘science of man.’ This paper examines a literary text written by prominent figure in that movement, Johann Gottlob Krüger’s Dreams (Träume) (1754). The collection of parables staged as dreams in this book presents specifically literary cases against the sufficiency of either philosophy or physiology for the study of human life as a whole. Through close readings of a number of these dreams and related texts, this paper shows how Krüger’s Dreams advocates an approach to anthropology that recognizes the importance of literature for an interdisciplinary study of human life. More than simply recognising literary writing as another means of studying human life, the vision of a new anthropology implied in this book draws on literary devices to counter the overconfidence and partisanship of existing philosophical and medical theories of human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three different appropriations of a 1928 photograph from South India allow insights into German anthropology in the 1920s, contemporary German museum practices, and present-day ritual forms in northern Kerala. Juxtaposing these readings as what Edwards named evidential strategies, power of representation, and re-experiencing demonstrates the possibilities and limits of visual representation. The article contributes to a Picturing Culture debate that considers entrenched visual economies of archived photographs, and opts for an understanding of different aspects of cultural knowledge transported through photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]