Since 09/2023
Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded project “Construction Pioneers”

10/ 2022 - 08 /2023
Replacement Professorship (W3), Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin

04/ 2019  -05/ 2022
Principal Investigator of the Thyssen-funded project “Making Aspirations Concrete”, Institute of Social Anthropology, Universität Heidelberg

10/ 2020 - 09/ 2021
Guest Lecturer (Replacement W3-Professorship), Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin

2017-2019
Lectureships at the Anthropological Departments at the Universities of Cologne and Münster

04/ 2012 - 12/ 2017
PhD Project Concepts and Practices of Kinship and Sociality among the Khmu Yuan of Northwestern Laos, a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne

2012-2014
Research Assistant at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne

2012-2013
Lectureships at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne

• Socio-economic change
• Materiality and architecture
• Kinship and Sociality
• Ethnography and ethnographic writing
• Regional focus: Southeast Asia, especially Upland Laos

How does newness enter the world? This question entices us to observe the creative ways in which new phenomena, things and ideas are incorporated by agents into existing sociocultural frameworks. One area in which changes are particularly visible is the built environment. In Laos, uplanders, many of whom belong to ethnic minorities, are currently experimenting with cement as a new building material. In recent years, the built landscape in northwestern Laos has been changing drastically. What is of particular interest to this proposed project is the apparently simple question of how local house builders handle this new building material and transform the design and shape of houses.

This project aims to make a novel contribution to the anthropology of houses by analysing the transformation of vernacular architecture by giving emphasis to the reasonings, incentives and imaginations of local lay house builders. The study context, a remote upland area where concrete houses did not exist previously, allows us to tackle the above question particularly well. Furthermore, it focuses on innovation in vernacular architecture, in conjunction with an emphasis on creative agency in ostensibly unlikely places. Looking beyond Southeast Asia, this project embarks from the premise that by studying the creative processes of incorporating new building materials when creating changing house forms and designs, new light can be shed on the overall practices of a community in accommodating newness.

Support: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Project Management: Rosalie Stolz
PhD research staff: Molly McGrath
International Cooperation Partners (in alphabetical order): Eli Elinoff (Victoria University, New Zealand) and Pierre Petit (Université libre de Bruxelles)
Duration: 2023-2026

What can we learn from the wide-spread transformations of houses in Southeast Asia and beyond? By taking the house and its transformations as a starting point or “prism”, hitherto unexplored facets and repercussion of socio-economic change can be illuminated, for the house manifests aspirations for development and prosperity in particular intimate ways and is a vital site of future- and world-making projects.

Amidst the dynamic societies of Southeast Asia, lives in Laos are changing particularly rapidly. While the current processes of socio-economic change in Laos have received increasing attention by social scientists, the role of local aspirations and their manifestation in ʻmodernʼ houses is hitherto unexplored. The proposed research aims to take modern houses and the aspirations they encapsulate as a prism through which upland initiatives of socio-economic change can be illuminated. Which aspirations and images of desirable futures are tied to the image of modern houses? In how far reinforce or transform the new materiality of houses, the changes of the construction process, and the social and cosmological dimensions of houses one another?

Support: Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
Project Management: Rosalie Stolz
Duration: 2019-2022 (paused during the time of the Replacement Professorship/Guest Lectureship at the Freie Universität Berlin)

In this project local notions and practices of kinship and sociality were studied in 14 months of fieldwork (2013, 2014-15) in a Khmu Yuan village in northern Laos. The dynamics of kinship in this upland area have, with few exceptions, not been given ethnographic attention to since the 1970s. As this study shows, the processes involved in this seemingly rigidly structured kinship setting, characterised by features which were of major interest to classical kinship studies such as the institution of houses, patrilineal kin groups and matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, in fact, present us with new avenues of thought in contemporary kinship studies: the reflection of this particular setting allows us, for instance, to illuminate how "given" kin ties are made into actual ties of mutual commitment.

Support: Full PhD Scholarship granted by a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne
Project Management: Rosalie Stolz
Duration: 2013-2017