Hanna Nieber
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 176689 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Hanna Nieber |
| NOMBRES | Hanna |
| APELLIDO | Nieber |
| FIRMA | NIEBER H |
| AFILIACIONES | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3192-5327 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 22 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 9 |
| OBRAS COMO AUTOR | 8 |
| OBRAS COMO EDITOR | 14 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2017 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Ethnography Beyond Earth
What is at stake in engaging outer space ethnographically when colonial histories and power structures continue to shape its exploration and imagination? This question anchored a panel convened in November 2024 at the World Anthropological Union Congress (WAU) in Johannesburg, where we, Hanna Nieber, Anton Nikolotov, Alana Osbourne and Anna Lisa Ramella, explored the intersections of cosmic inquiry, colonial legacies, and ethnographic method. Uni…
Secularism
The anthropology of secularism studies how nation-states actively shape ‘religion’ as a category, institutional structure, and lived experience. It does not cast secularism as an impersonal process through which religion inevitably declines or retreats to the private sphere as modernisation advances. Instead, this subfield of anthropology understands secularism to be a mode of governance—a dense web of laws, institutions, and sensibilities—that p…
Beauty
Beauty is an aesthetic value that is tied to embodied practices, affects, and the senses. Whereas philosophers have long discussed beauty as disembodied aesthetics, and scientists have searched for bodily features that are considered universally beautiful, social and cultural anthropologists have emphasised the social and ritual aspects of beauty. They have shown that beauty is defined differently across time and space, often being tied to cultur…
Dance
Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are en…
Ink
Atmospheres
Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation. Yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. People often experience atmospheres as something that cannot be put into words easily; nevertheless, atmospheres enable or disable certa…
Outer Space
People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billion…
Anti-Blackness
Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it mani…
Heads in the Stars, Feet on the Ground
This article explores the evolution of radio astronomy in South Africa and Madagascar, focusing on how “scale” functions as both a way of understanding the world and marking differences in existence. In outer space research, the ground is crucial but often overlooked. By collaboratively examining the expansion of infrastructure for radio astronomy, driven by the goal of scaling up research objectives, we navigate across different scales to presen…
Affect
Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although regis…
Deep sea
The mystery evoked by the deep sea-its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility-has long captivated the public imagination. Iconic works of science fiction as well as pioneering documentaries reflect a fascination with unveiling the unknown; this spirit of discovery, of bringing light into the depths, remains alive today and has arguably even intensified. The deep sea has also emerged as a critical geopolitical space. Scientists race to study it…
Technology
Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for 'skill' or 'craftmanship'. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows ant…
Religious Plurality in Africa
Debt
Debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe, but it often accompanies inequality, oppression, and unrest. Responding to this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. It considers a debate in anthropol…
Dreams
Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached-if not always formally recognised-as sourc…
Commodity and supply chains
The global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity means that cultures and places around the world have become interdependent. People’s desires in one place organise work and landscapes elsewhere; seamless flows of goods create new infrastructures; and places become united by an exchange of commodities and dif…
Authority with Textual Materials - Power of the Written Qur'an
The article studies the performance of Islamic authority through texts. It combines this with a close investigation of the textuality of these texts-that is, their letterforms as well as shapes of words and sentences-and their material affordances. Given that Muslims understand the Qur'an to be powerful, this article argues that it is the concrete possibilities that textuality provides which feed into Islamic authority. This article takes an ethn…
Surveillance
Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or re…
Mental Health
When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new c…
Jesus for Zanzibar. Pentecostal Narratives of (Non)Belonging, Islam and Nation, written by Hans Olsson
Islamic Zanzibar
Through a discourse on religious difference, Zanzibar's belonging to both the Indian Ocean and the Tanzanian mainland is enacted and challenged. While Zanzibar is often described as a space of encounter forming a cosmopolitan society, I argue in this contribution for attention to moments of differentiation that these encounters evoke
They all just want to get healthy!' Drinking the Qur'an between forming religious and medical subjectivities in Zanzibar
This article investigates how the practice of drinking kombe (drinking washed off Qur'anic verses) informs subjectivities in the nexus of 'religion', 'medicine' and their Swahili approximations dini and dawa. Situated in Zanzibar, it is mostly referred to as dawa ya kiislamu, bringing 'medicine' and 'religion' together and providing space for multiple enactments of subjectivities. Most prominently, Christians' use of kombe requests a different en…
Mental Health
When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new c…
They all just want to get healthy!' Drinking the Qur'an between forming religious and medical subjectivities in Zanzibar
This article investigates how the practice of drinking kombe (drinking washed off Qur'anic verses) informs subjectivities in the nexus of 'religion', 'medicine' and their Swahili approximations dini and dawa. Situated in Zanzibar, it is mostly referred to as dawa ya kiislamu, bringing 'medicine' and 'religion' together and providing space for multiple enactments of subjectivities. Most prominently, Christians' use of kombe requests a different en…
Affect
Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although regis…
Islamic Zanzibar
Through a discourse on religious difference, Zanzibar's belonging to both the Indian Ocean and the Tanzanian mainland is enacted and challenged. While Zanzibar is often described as a space of encounter forming a cosmopolitan society, I argue in this contribution for attention to moments of differentiation that these encounters evoke
They all just want to get healthy!' Drinking the Qur'an between forming religious and medical subjectivities in Zanzibar
This article investigates how the practice of drinking kombe (drinking washed off Qur'anic verses) informs subjectivities in the nexus of 'religion', 'medicine' and their Swahili approximations dini and dawa. Situated in Zanzibar, it is mostly referred to as dawa ya kiislamu, bringing 'medicine' and 'religion' together and providing space for multiple enactments of subjectivities. Most prominently, Christians' use of kombe requests a different en…
Islamic Zanzibar
Through a discourse on religious difference, Zanzibar's belonging to both the Indian Ocean and the Tanzanian mainland is enacted and challenged. While Zanzibar is often described as a space of encounter forming a cosmopolitan society, I argue in this contribution for attention to moments of differentiation that these encounters evoke
Jesus for Zanzibar. Pentecostal Narratives of (Non)Belonging, Islam and Nation, written by Hans Olsson
Surveillance
Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or re…
Mental Health
When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new c…
Religious Plurality in Africa
Debt
Debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe, but it often accompanies inequality, oppression, and unrest. Responding to this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. It considers a debate in anthropol…
Dreams
Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached-if not always formally recognised-as sourc…
Commodity and supply chains
The global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity means that cultures and places around the world have become interdependent. People’s desires in one place organise work and landscapes elsewhere; seamless flows of goods create new infrastructures; and places become united by an exchange of commodities and dif…
Authority with Textual Materials - Power of the Written Qur'an
The article studies the performance of Islamic authority through texts. It combines this with a close investigation of the textuality of these texts-that is, their letterforms as well as shapes of words and sentences-and their material affordances. Given that Muslims understand the Qur'an to be powerful, this article argues that it is the concrete possibilities that textuality provides which feed into Islamic authority. This article takes an ethn…
Dance
Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are en…
Ink
Atmospheres
Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation. Yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. People often experience atmospheres as something that cannot be put into words easily; nevertheless, atmospheres enable or disable certa…
Outer Space
People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billion…
Anti-Blackness
Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it mani…
Heads in the Stars, Feet on the Ground
This article explores the evolution of radio astronomy in South Africa and Madagascar, focusing on how “scale” functions as both a way of understanding the world and marking differences in existence. In outer space research, the ground is crucial but often overlooked. By collaboratively examining the expansion of infrastructure for radio astronomy, driven by the goal of scaling up research objectives, we navigate across different scales to presen…
Affect
Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although regis…
Deep sea
The mystery evoked by the deep sea-its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility-has long captivated the public imagination. Iconic works of science fiction as well as pioneering documentaries reflect a fascination with unveiling the unknown; this spirit of discovery, of bringing light into the depths, remains alive today and has arguably even intensified. The deep sea has also emerged as a critical geopolitical space. Scientists race to study it…
Technology
Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for 'skill' or 'craftmanship'. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows ant…
Ethnography Beyond Earth
What is at stake in engaging outer space ethnographically when colonial histories and power structures continue to shape its exploration and imagination? This question anchored a panel convened in November 2024 at the World Anthropological Union Congress (WAU) in Johannesburg, where we, Hanna Nieber, Anton Nikolotov, Alana Osbourne and Anna Lisa Ramella, explored the intersections of cosmic inquiry, colonial legacies, and ethnographic method. Uni…
Secularism
The anthropology of secularism studies how nation-states actively shape ‘religion’ as a category, institutional structure, and lived experience. It does not cast secularism as an impersonal process through which religion inevitably declines or retreats to the private sphere as modernisation advances. Instead, this subfield of anthropology understands secularism to be a mode of governance—a dense web of laws, institutions, and sensibilities—that p…
Beauty
Beauty is an aesthetic value that is tied to embodied practices, affects, and the senses. Whereas philosophers have long discussed beauty as disembodied aesthetics, and scientists have searched for bodily features that are considered universally beautiful, social and cultural anthropologists have emphasised the social and ritual aspects of beauty. They have shown that beauty is defined differently across time and space, often being tied to cultur…
Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 obras) · History (6 obras) · Sociology (6 obras) · Ethnography (5 obras) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (5 obras) · Philosophy (5 obras) · Politics (5 obras) · Anthropology (4 obras) · Islam (4 obras) · Law (4 obras)