Dr. Christiane Falck

Christiane Falck holds the deputy professorship of general anthropology with an Asia-Pacific focus at our institute. She conducts research in the South-West Pacific on human-environment relations, environmental change, religious change, Pacific Christianities, materiality and religion. Christiane is interested in anthropological approaches to questions of being (ontology) in their discursive and non-discursive dimensions, political realities, and material effects (political ontology). She also works on gender, concepts of personhood, perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in (post)colonial contexts, and is interested in museum anthropology. She has extensive fieldwork experience in the middle Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, where she works with Nyaura (West Iatmul) communities. In her current research, “Encountering Nature in the Anthropocene”, Christiane investigates the impact of religious and ecological change on a society whose cosmology is based on close human-environment relationships.