Research projects
Abstract Post-Doc Project
“Sandscapes in Southeast Asia”After water, sand is the most-used raw material in the world today. More than 80% of the 40 billion tons of sand consumed annually are used as concrete in construction. However, in many countries, the sand that needs to be excavated in coastal regions is considered depleted, while demand is simultaneously increasing – there is a sand shortage. Particularly in countries such as China, which uses over 50% of the concrete produced globally, or Singapore, which uses the raw material for land reclamation, sand has emerged as a key import commodity that is imported from almost all countries in Southeast Asia despite local bans.
Selling sand entails huge profit margins because, as a common good, it has no owner (Torres et al. 2017). At the same time, sand mining not only leaves landscapes devastated and has disastrous ecological consequences, it also provokes social conflicts: with the increasing demand for sand as a raw material, the conflict between residents, conservationists and those responsible for mining is intensifying. Interfaces to debates about the Anthropocene (as well as the Capitalocene or the Chthulucene) become apparent, because a capitalist logic of exploitation comes into play through human intervention in the cycle of rocks, which is driven by the maxim of 'progress'. Along a few capitalist centers of value creation and generation, sand (for example from Cambodia) is transformed from a natural sediment to a commodity and – as in Singapore – back to a sediment again. A review of the state of research on the topic reveals a dominance of ecological and economic studies; the social consequences for local residents remain unclear to this day.
The research project “Sandscapes in Southeast Asia” will focus on the social, religious and ecological consequences of sand extraction. Specifically, the project will address the question of the extent to which humans and non-humans reshape their relationships in a landscape massively affected by resource extraction: between nature and culture, between machines, ghosts and monsters, and between politics and ecology.
Summary Dissertation Project
Paul Christensen examines the significant roles played by spirits in Cambodian society, based on the question of the relevance of spirit practices. He places the important thematic emphases on the processing of the traumatic past, the religious identification of Cambodians, the political empowerment of the elites through spiritual legitimation strategies and the living ritual practice of spirit mediums in Cambodia. The anthropological approach of 13 months of field research and an innovative methodology based on actor-network theory allows an emic understanding of these religious phenomena in the sense of a (re)enchanted modernity, which occur in similar ways throughout Southeast Asia.
The work provides a groundbreaking contribution to the academic understanding of spirits. It is not only the methodology that is convincing; the ethnography provides descriptions of social topics such as power, existence, religion, healing, love or mourning that not only make the 'other' plausible, but also question the 'self'.
The dissertation was published here.