Wolfgang Vogel, M.A.

When a "Mir san mir!" ("We are who we are", a Bavarian catchphrase) becomes "Why then are we who we are?", your answer may depend on your education as a cultural anthropologist. Therefore, Volkskunde (Cultural Anthropology) is not only concerned with regional characteristics, but also raises questions about what is actually behind such concepts of identity that creates friction between the familiar and the strange within one’s own culture, always warranting to be fathomed again.

My dissertation project examines Alfred Brehm, generally known as the "father of animals", and his view of people. On his numerous journeys, all others remain strangers, even in their own places, while Alfred Brehm remains firmly entrenched in his bourgeois world view of the nineteenth century. He is to be understood in the context of the genesis of the science of ethnology. The central question here is: how someone describes people who, in turn, attributes human traits to animals. (Working title: ‘Negros living in the wild’ and courtship in Kirghizia - Alfred Edmund Brehm as a human observer and ethnographer)