G Sprenger
Biographic Data
| ID | 47729 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G Sprenger |
| GIVEN NAMES | G |
| FAMILY NAME | Sprenger |
| SIGNATURE | SPRENGER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Heidelberg University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2027-6779 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A Comment on Alvi and Werth 2024
Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia: Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Coexistence
Indonesia’s current president Joko Widodo wants to develop Indonesia from its margins, with mixed results so far. One target area for capitalist investment are the Aru Islands in Maluku Province, Eastern Indonesia. Such investment plans rarely cater for cultural needs or analyse their social compatibility. Governments, investors and local population groups invoke diverging ecologies. Government and investor argue that nature must be adapted to th…
Counterintuitive utopias: What modern society can learn from anthropology
What if the institutions of modern society were not informed by the ideas of Descartes or Adam Smith but by those of Mauss, Viveiros de Castro or their anthropological inspirations? This extrapolation would lead to counterintui-tive utopias, to institutions that are always in the making, but that nevertheless offer alternative ways of dealing with xenophobia, capitalism or the environmental crisis. Xenophobia would be countered by the model of th…
Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village
Deflecting responsibility: Spirits in Southeast Asia and “systems” in Western modernity
While studies of responsibility have been concerned with the ways responsibility is traced to accountable human persons or institutions, the deflection of responsibility to nonhumans that are not accountable has been neglected. Such deflections may follow at least two different procedures. The Rmeet in Laos sometimes opt to deflect responsibility for wrongdoing to spirits who temporarily obfuscate a person’s intentionality. People in modern conte…
Christopher J. Shepherd. Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975
Power and transcendence: A comment on upland pioneers
Upland pioneering involves variations of two themes: drawing in power from the outside and the transcendence of local bounded social entities. Both integrate the distinction between inside and outside at the base of sociality in upland Southeast Asia. Pioneering is a valorised activity that continuously takes on new forms and thereby exemplifies the dynamics of inside and outside. Data from the Rmeet in Laos show that these movements have a gende…
Staying or Moving: Government Compliance and Agency in Post-Zomian Laos
James C. Scott claimed that upland Southeast Asians consider their good life as dependent on their autonomy from the state. Given that the state today is present in various forms in the uplands, current uplanders can be considered as post-Zomian. Staying and moving represent two contrastive values in this region whose realisation serves to make a good life possible. This article considers these values through the issue of resettlement in Laos, a …
On Tides of Empire: Religion, Development and Environment in Cambodia by Courtney Work
Can Animism Save the World? Reflections on Personhood and Complexity in the Ecological Crisis
The term “animism” is at once a fantasy internal to modernity and a semiotic conduit enabling a serious inquiry into non-modern phenomena that radically call into question the modern distinction of nature and culture. Therefore, I suggest that the labelling of people, practices or ideas as “animist” is a strategic one. I also raise the question if animism can help to solve the modern ecological crisis that allegedly stems from the nature-culture …
The Comparison of Structures and the Comparison of Systems: Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Luhmann
The notion that comparison is not the search for similarities but the systematization of differences leads to the question of which shared set of concepts and assumptions might be employed to explore this notion. Comparative analysis should at once reduce the complexity of data in the service of comparison and yet still reference the uniqueness and specificity of local values and ideas. Three types of comparison potentially fulfill these criteria…
Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia
Buddhism and Coffee: The Transformation of Locality and Non-Human Personhood in Southern Laos
Århem, Nikolas: Forests, Spirits, and High Modernist Development - A Study of Cosmology and Change among the Katuic Peoples in the Uplands of Laos and Vietnam
Anthropos , Seite 295 - 296
Communicated into being: Systems theory and the shifting of ontological status
The inclusion of non-humans as persons into social systems raises the question: How exactly are they constituted as communicating beings? This article suggests an approach informed by Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems. In particular, it addresses the question why some beings are more person-like in some contexts and more like objects or potencies in others. According to Luhmann, social systems consist not of persons but of sel…
Of myths and metallurgy: Archaeological and ethnological approaches to upland iron production in 9th century CE northwest Laos
Our recent discovery and excavation of a series of iron smelting furnaces, dated to the eighth and ninth century CE, near upland Rmet villages in northwest Laos, potentially sheds new light on the role of regional upland groups during the immediate pre-Tai period. The oral tradition associated with these furnaces emphasises the role of an ancient population of metallurgists who left the area under pressure from the Rmet. These stories could refer…
The connectivity of ethnic displays: New codes for identity in northern Laos
In Laos, cultural festivals and other forms of ethnic display communicate locality and ethnicity to external agencies, in particular the nation state. This article documents strategies of identity-making in a small festival that was staged spontaneously in a Rmeet (Lamet) village. The chosen representations were conventional: dance, music, clothing. The Rmeet thereby employed a festival code used by numerous minorities worldwide. But these recent…
Structured and unstructured misunderstandings: Towards an anthropological theory of misunderstanding
Misunderstandings are not only the foundation of social and cultural anthropology but also a necessity in human communication. This article stresses the productive and creative aspects of misunderstanding. In particular, and in complementation to hermeneutic approaches, it stresses the expansive social nature of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings involve more than two speakers, and it should be the aim of an anthropological theory of misunderst…
Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life
Space and the Production of Cultural Difference Among the Akha Prior to Globalization - 1[-]Table of Contents - 8[-]List of Maps, Tables, Figures and Illustrations - 12[-]Preface - 14[-]Acknowledgments - 16[-]Note on Akha Transcription - 18[-]1 Bearings - 22[-]2 Moving Through History - 48[-]3 Space and the Flow of Life - 66[-]4 Spatializing the Upland Village Polity and its Alter, the Lowland Muang - 74[-]5 Space and Fertility in House and Field…
On the Edge of the Sacred Forest
It is obvious to say that the relations between human beings and their nonhuman environment are complex, but it is important to draw attention to the way this complexity is modeled and which of the relevant actors and relationships are drawn upon for explanation-in particular when scholars, like the authors of these three volumes, intend to revise and reconceptualise humanenvironment relationships.These relationships are always formed under speci…
Bräunlein, Peter J: Passion/Pasyon. Rituale des Schmerzes im europäischen und philippinischen Christentum
Anthropos , Seite 641 - 642
Differentiated Origins: Trajectories of Transcultural Knowledge in Laos and Beyond
Ethnicity belongs to the most important types of differentiation in Laos. Among the means to establish such differences is the ascription of bodies of knowledge to various ethnicities. Ritual healing knowledge is often associated with the foreign and the culturally different. The attribution of differentiated categories of foreignness thus supports the emergence and reproduction of ethnic differentiation and interethnic communication in this regi…
From Power to Value: Ranked Titles in an Egalitarian Society, Laos
In the Southeast Asian highlands, different types of hierarchy appear as forms of social organization as well as devices for intersocietal communication. In the present case, ranked titles from centralized Tai Meuang hierarchies such as the Lao or the Lue in southern China have been adopted by Rmeet (Lamet) uplanders in northern Laos, where the main type of hierarchy is the decentralized superiority of wife-givers over wife-takers. In the process…
Invisible Blood: Self-censorship and the Public in Uplander Ritual, Laos
Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia
Communicated into being: Systems theory and the shifting of ontological status
The inclusion of non-humans as persons into social systems raises the question: How exactly are they constituted as communicating beings? This article suggests an approach informed by Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems. In particular, it addresses the question why some beings are more person-like in some contexts and more like objects or potencies in others. According to Luhmann, social systems consist not of persons but of sel…
Buddhism and Coffee: The Transformation of Locality and Non-Human Personhood in Southern Laos
Staying or Moving: Government Compliance and Agency in Post-Zomian Laos
James C. Scott claimed that upland Southeast Asians consider their good life as dependent on their autonomy from the state. Given that the state today is present in various forms in the uplands, current uplanders can be considered as post-Zomian. Staying and moving represent two contrastive values in this region whose realisation serves to make a good life possible. This article considers these values through the issue of resettlement in Laos, a …
Out of the ashes: Swidden cultivation in highland Laos
From Power to Value: Ranked Titles in an Egalitarian Society, Laos
In the Southeast Asian highlands, different types of hierarchy appear as forms of social organization as well as devices for intersocietal communication. In the present case, ranked titles from centralized Tai Meuang hierarchies such as the Lao or the Lue in southern China have been adopted by Rmeet (Lamet) uplanders in northern Laos, where the main type of hierarchy is the decentralized superiority of wife-givers over wife-takers. In the process…
Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life
Space and the Production of Cultural Difference Among the Akha Prior to Globalization - 1[-]Table of Contents - 8[-]List of Maps, Tables, Figures and Illustrations - 12[-]Preface - 14[-]Acknowledgments - 16[-]Note on Akha Transcription - 18[-]1 Bearings - 22[-]2 Moving Through History - 48[-]3 Space and the Flow of Life - 66[-]4 Spatializing the Upland Village Polity and its Alter, the Lowland Muang - 74[-]5 Space and Fertility in House and Field…
Invisible Blood: Self-censorship and the Public in Uplander Ritual, Laos
The connectivity of ethnic displays: New codes for identity in northern Laos
In Laos, cultural festivals and other forms of ethnic display communicate locality and ethnicity to external agencies, in particular the nation state. This article documents strategies of identity-making in a small festival that was staged spontaneously in a Rmeet (Lamet) village. The chosen representations were conventional: dance, music, clothing. The Rmeet thereby employed a festival code used by numerous minorities worldwide. But these recent…
Differentiated Origins: Trajectories of Transcultural Knowledge in Laos and Beyond
Ethnicity belongs to the most important types of differentiation in Laos. Among the means to establish such differences is the ascription of bodies of knowledge to various ethnicities. Ritual healing knowledge is often associated with the foreign and the culturally different. The attribution of differentiated categories of foreignness thus supports the emergence and reproduction of ethnic differentiation and interethnic communication in this regi…
Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange-giving, taking, and returning-with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconside…
Of myths and metallurgy: Archaeological and ethnological approaches to upland iron production in 9th century CE northwest Laos
Our recent discovery and excavation of a series of iron smelting furnaces, dated to the eighth and ninth century CE, near upland Rmet villages in northwest Laos, potentially sheds new light on the role of regional upland groups during the immediate pre-Tai period. The oral tradition associated with these furnaces emphasises the role of an ancient population of metallurgists who left the area under pressure from the Rmet. These stories could refer…
Structured and unstructured misunderstandings: Towards an anthropological theory of misunderstanding
Misunderstandings are not only the foundation of social and cultural anthropology but also a necessity in human communication. This article stresses the productive and creative aspects of misunderstanding. In particular, and in complementation to hermeneutic approaches, it stresses the expansive social nature of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings involve more than two speakers, and it should be the aim of an anthropological theory of misunderst…
The Way of the Buffaloes: Trade and Sacrifice in Northern Laos
This article links buffalo sacrifices among Rmeet (Lamet) in Northern Laos to trade. Buffalo sacrifices for house spirits reintegrate ill persons into a socio-cosmic whole consisting of relations to agnatic kin, ancestors, and spirits. Yet, this is dependent on external forces. Buffaloes are bought rather than raised, and the availability of paid labor and markets interacts with the rituals. But while sacrifice reproduces representations that mak…
Encompassment and its Discontents: The Rmeet and the Lowland Lao
The Way of the Buffaloes: Trade and Sacrifice in Northern Laos
This article links buffalo sacrifices among Rmeet (Lamet) in Northern Laos to trade. Buffalo sacrifices for house spirits reintegrate ill persons into a socio-cosmic whole consisting of relations to agnatic kin, ancestors, and spirits. Yet, this is dependent on external forces. Buffaloes are bought rather than raised, and the availability of paid labor and markets interacts with the rituals. But while sacrifice reproduces representations that mak…
Out of the ashes: Swidden cultivation in highland Laos
From Kettledrums to coins: Social transformation and the flow of valuables in northern Laos
Three levels of social organization, all characterized by inside/outside distinctions from the Rmeet point of view, are important here: kinship groupings within Rmeet society; ethnic categories, in particular Rmeet and lowlanders; and states, in particular Laos and Thailand. At each level, the inside/outside relation is articulated in exchange. The definition of social entities by exchange has two aspects: the first concerns exchanges between the…
Invisible Blood: Self-censorship and the Public in Uplander Ritual, Laos
From Power to Value: Ranked Titles in an Egalitarian Society, Laos
In the Southeast Asian highlands, different types of hierarchy appear as forms of social organization as well as devices for intersocietal communication. In the present case, ranked titles from centralized Tai Meuang hierarchies such as the Lao or the Lue in southern China have been adopted by Rmeet (Lamet) uplanders in northern Laos, where the main type of hierarchy is the decentralized superiority of wife-givers over wife-takers. In the process…
Bräunlein, Peter J: Passion/Pasyon. Rituale des Schmerzes im europäischen und philippinischen Christentum
Anthropos , Seite 641 - 642
Differentiated Origins: Trajectories of Transcultural Knowledge in Laos and Beyond
Ethnicity belongs to the most important types of differentiation in Laos. Among the means to establish such differences is the ascription of bodies of knowledge to various ethnicities. Ritual healing knowledge is often associated with the foreign and the culturally different. The attribution of differentiated categories of foreignness thus supports the emergence and reproduction of ethnic differentiation and interethnic communication in this regi…
On the Edge of the Sacred Forest
It is obvious to say that the relations between human beings and their nonhuman environment are complex, but it is important to draw attention to the way this complexity is modeled and which of the relevant actors and relationships are drawn upon for explanation-in particular when scholars, like the authors of these three volumes, intend to revise and reconceptualise humanenvironment relationships.These relationships are always formed under speci…
Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life
Space and the Production of Cultural Difference Among the Akha Prior to Globalization - 1[-]Table of Contents - 8[-]List of Maps, Tables, Figures and Illustrations - 12[-]Preface - 14[-]Acknowledgments - 16[-]Note on Akha Transcription - 18[-]1 Bearings - 22[-]2 Moving Through History - 48[-]3 Space and the Flow of Life - 66[-]4 Spatializing the Upland Village Polity and its Alter, the Lowland Muang - 74[-]5 Space and Fertility in House and Field…
Of myths and metallurgy: Archaeological and ethnological approaches to upland iron production in 9th century CE northwest Laos
Our recent discovery and excavation of a series of iron smelting furnaces, dated to the eighth and ninth century CE, near upland Rmet villages in northwest Laos, potentially sheds new light on the role of regional upland groups during the immediate pre-Tai period. The oral tradition associated with these furnaces emphasises the role of an ancient population of metallurgists who left the area under pressure from the Rmet. These stories could refer…
The connectivity of ethnic displays: New codes for identity in northern Laos
In Laos, cultural festivals and other forms of ethnic display communicate locality and ethnicity to external agencies, in particular the nation state. This article documents strategies of identity-making in a small festival that was staged spontaneously in a Rmeet (Lamet) village. The chosen representations were conventional: dance, music, clothing. The Rmeet thereby employed a festival code used by numerous minorities worldwide. But these recent…
Structured and unstructured misunderstandings: Towards an anthropological theory of misunderstanding
Misunderstandings are not only the foundation of social and cultural anthropology but also a necessity in human communication. This article stresses the productive and creative aspects of misunderstanding. In particular, and in complementation to hermeneutic approaches, it stresses the expansive social nature of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings involve more than two speakers, and it should be the aim of an anthropological theory of misunderst…
Århem, Nikolas: Forests, Spirits, and High Modernist Development - A Study of Cosmology and Change among the Katuic Peoples in the Uplands of Laos and Vietnam
Anthropos , Seite 295 - 296
Communicated into being: Systems theory and the shifting of ontological status
The inclusion of non-humans as persons into social systems raises the question: How exactly are they constituted as communicating beings? This article suggests an approach informed by Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems. In particular, it addresses the question why some beings are more person-like in some contexts and more like objects or potencies in others. According to Luhmann, social systems consist not of persons but of sel…
Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia
Buddhism and Coffee: The Transformation of Locality and Non-Human Personhood in Southern Laos
The Comparison of Structures and the Comparison of Systems: Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Luhmann
The notion that comparison is not the search for similarities but the systematization of differences leads to the question of which shared set of concepts and assumptions might be employed to explore this notion. Comparative analysis should at once reduce the complexity of data in the service of comparison and yet still reference the uniqueness and specificity of local values and ideas. Three types of comparison potentially fulfill these criteria…
Christopher J. Shepherd. Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860–1975
Power and transcendence: A comment on upland pioneers
Upland pioneering involves variations of two themes: drawing in power from the outside and the transcendence of local bounded social entities. Both integrate the distinction between inside and outside at the base of sociality in upland Southeast Asia. Pioneering is a valorised activity that continuously takes on new forms and thereby exemplifies the dynamics of inside and outside. Data from the Rmeet in Laos show that these movements have a gende…
Staying or Moving: Government Compliance and Agency in Post-Zomian Laos
James C. Scott claimed that upland Southeast Asians consider their good life as dependent on their autonomy from the state. Given that the state today is present in various forms in the uplands, current uplanders can be considered as post-Zomian. Staying and moving represent two contrastive values in this region whose realisation serves to make a good life possible. This article considers these values through the issue of resettlement in Laos, a …
On Tides of Empire: Religion, Development and Environment in Cambodia by Courtney Work
Can Animism Save the World? Reflections on Personhood and Complexity in the Ecological Crisis
The term “animism” is at once a fantasy internal to modernity and a semiotic conduit enabling a serious inquiry into non-modern phenomena that radically call into question the modern distinction of nature and culture. Therefore, I suggest that the labelling of people, practices or ideas as “animist” is a strategic one. I also raise the question if animism can help to solve the modern ecological crisis that allegedly stems from the nature-culture …
Deflecting responsibility: Spirits in Southeast Asia and “systems” in Western modernity
While studies of responsibility have been concerned with the ways responsibility is traced to accountable human persons or institutions, the deflection of responsibility to nonhumans that are not accountable has been neglected. Such deflections may follow at least two different procedures. The Rmeet in Laos sometimes opt to deflect responsibility for wrongdoing to spirits who temporarily obfuscate a person’s intentionality. People in modern conte…
Plural Ecologies in Southeast Asia: Hierarchies, Conflicts, and Coexistence
Indonesia’s current president Joko Widodo wants to develop Indonesia from its margins, with mixed results so far. One target area for capitalist investment are the Aru Islands in Maluku Province, Eastern Indonesia. Such investment plans rarely cater for cultural needs or analyse their social compatibility. Governments, investors and local population groups invoke diverging ecologies. Government and investor argue that nature must be adapted to th…
Sociology (19 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (18 works) · History (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Ethnology (8 works)