Why Anthropology Matters
Martin Zillinger
Research on, among others:
Media, museum, religion, Mediterranean region
Liana Chua
Research on, among others:
Anthropocene, religion, environmental protection, South East Asia
Karim Zafer
Reseach on, among others:
Youth, migration, transnationalism, Europe, Mediterranean region
In this series of short video clips, anthropologists explain why anthropology is indispensable today. Based on the fundamental question of anthropology – what it means to be human – they show how anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Especially in a world of growing complexity and profound difference, anthropology opens up perspectives that reject simple answers and instead offer nuanced, relational analyses of social realities.
The videos highlight how anthropology is driven by curiosity and critical reflection, and therefore always has a transformative effect: it shapes both existing knowledges and the researchers themselves. Anthropology expands the scope for thinking and action by taking alternative social and cultural orders seriously, questioning knowledge hierarchies, and showing how social transformations can be conceived, practised and realised.
Specific topics such as migration illustrate how anthropological research analyses global inequalities, border regimes and everyday lives in their political, economic and moral dimensions. Questions concerning the decolonisation of academia focus on the discipline’s own knowledge production and show how reflexive methods and scientific cooperation on an equal footing give rise to new forms of research and teaching. Environmental-anthropological research highlights how supposedly natural phenomena such as species extinction and climate change are intricately intertwined with social orders, economic practices, political power relations and cultural attributions of meaning, and can only be adequately understood in this context.
At the heart of the discipline is ethnographic fieldwork: long-term, participatory observation based on empathy and involvement. Anthropologists navigate social grey areas, ambivalences and fields of tension, enabling insights precisely where normative categories reach their limits and other research methods are blind.
The series began at the GASCA (German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology) conference in Cologne in 2025, when Sebastian Eschenbach and Britta von der Behrens interviewed several colleagues about their work. The clips portray anthropology as a critical, inquisitive and transformative practice – as a discipline that re-examines fundamental questions of humanity while making tangible contributions that address the major challenges of our time.