Dr. Tim Burger

Tim Burger is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen. Before taking on the position, he worked as a research fellow at the CRC ‘Cultures of Vigilance’ at LMU Munich. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology in 2024 from the University of Cambridge and holds degrees in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and LMU Munich.

Burger’s research focuses on economic practices, agriculture, environment, and value. He currently works on a book manuscript provisionally titled ‘Losing the Land: Agriculture and Abandonment in the Azores’ which brings an environmental approach to the study of rural abandonment. Based on his doctoral fieldwork in a depopulated village, it tells the story of Azorean islanders who live out their consciousness of historical decline by engaging with agrarian land that is known to lie in ruins. His new project examines the social conditions and moral conceptions of tobacco farming among Indonesian smallholders. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Upland Java, it asks how wealth and gender are navigated in the context of cultivating a crop perceived as profitable yet morally ambiguous. Burger’s research has been supported by the ESRC, DAAD, German Academic National Fund, the Max Weber-Program, and a Vice-Chancellors Award by the University of Cambridge.

Tim Burger is the author of journal articles on themes like human-animal relations, money, and the postcolonial state, published in journals such as Social Analysis, Sociologus and Paideuma. He also co-edited collections on feminist approaches to the study of capitalism (Boasblogs, 2023), on the role of literature in the ethnographic imagination (Edition Trickster, 2024), and on field methodology (Transcript, 2024).