Gertrud Hüwelmeier
Biographic Data
| ID | 79675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gertrud Hüwelmeier |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gertrud |
| FAMILY NAME | Hüwelmeier |
| SIGNATURE | HÜWELMEIER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1198-0385 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Face Masks for the Ancestors: Everyday Life and Death during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Urban Hanoi
This essay examines the everyday life and death of residents in urban Hanoi during the fourth wave of the pandemic in the summer of 2021. The article considers how city dwellers developed manifold creative strategies to deal with government requirements and argue that part of the population developed tactics of survival to circumvent prescribed rules in coping with the pandemic. But it was not just the living who were affected by the virus. The d…
Colonial Ghosts, the French Cemetery and Urban Renewal in Hanoi
After the end of the colonial regime in Vietnam, the French Cemetery in Hanoi was levelled to make way for newly planned collective apartment blocks. Due to rural migration to the city and the subsequent housing shortage in the 1960s, people settled there, some occupying the lower rooms of the mortuary as accommodation. Humans were not the only residents; they cohabited with wandering ghosts of tirailleurs Sénégalais, French colonial soldiers fro…
On the Banks of the Red River - Urban Renewal, Public Art, and Environmentalism in Late Socialist Hanoi
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
The Sacred Cowshed Tree in Urban Hanoi: A Home for Unredeemed Souls
The “Cowshed Tree” (Cây đa nhà Bò), located next to a maternity hospital in urban Hanoi, has long been a destination for women and men who offer prayers to ensure a successful birth and to give thanks for a healthy baby. As the nearby hospital also performs abortions, the crown of the huge banyan tree with its aerial roots has come to be regarded by many city residents as a home for unredeemed souls. But the history of the tree and narratives abo…
Feeding the spirits: Cooking, offering and reclaiming lộc in late socialist Vietnam
Food is intrinsic to Vietnamese ritual activities. Religious practices involve cooking for ancestors and the presentation of food to deities, spirits of national heroes, tutelary spirits, as well as to wandering ghosts of war dead at various localities and in multiple contexts. In conjunction with food offerings, people burn incense and transmit prayers at altars and shrines, and in a response, spirits bestow lộc, blessed food, which is then dist…
Spirit map and medium's message: Searching for war dead in Vietnam
Popular religious practices such as communicating with the deceased take place in many parts of the world. In cases of death through violence, as in warfare, the living worry about the dead bodies of their loved ones as the lack of bodily remains makes it impossible to perform a proper burial. Vietnam is a valuable case study because it has experienced terrible violence in the 20th century. This article explores the pilgrimage of a group of broth…
Spirit Writing in Vietnam: Political Lessons from the Beyond
Spirit writing is a rare form of trance mediumship in contemporary urban Hanoi and part of the resurgence of popular religious practices in late Socialist Vietnam. This article explores the transmission of otherworldly messages from heroic political and military leaders of the past via an urban female spirit medium and examines practices of translation, decoding and implementing celestial directives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper inv…
Market Shrines and Urban Renewal in Hanoi
Socialist Cosmopolitans in Postsocialist Europe
Prior to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, thousands of students and tens of thousands of contract workers from Vietnam arrived in socialist ‘fraternal’ countries. A number of them established social and economic relations with locals, compatriots, and migrants from various socialist states in the Cold War period, although they had been discouraged by Vietnamese authorities in creating close personal ties with ‘foreigners’ in general. …
Cell phones for the spirits: Ancestor Worship and Ritual Economies in Vietnam and Its Diasporas
Religion has been thriving in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since đổi mới, the onset of market reforms in the late 1980s. Votive paper offerings, part of spiritual and economic well-being, play a crucial role in performing religious practices in the socialist country as well as among diasporic Vietnamese. In urban Hanoi, material objects made from paper are traded in marketplaces and later burned in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in pri…
Performing Intimacy with God: Spiritual Experiences in Vietnamese Diasporic Pentecostal Networks
Journal Article Performing Intimacy with God: Spiritual Experiences in Vietnamese Diasporic Pentecostal Networks Get access Gertrud Hüwelmeier Gertrud Hüwelmeier Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 32, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 414–430, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghu062 Published: 11 August 2014
Bazaar Pagodas – Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialistgovernment, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayedin the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economicsituation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small businessand petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successfulentrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern parts of…
Bazaar Pagodas – Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialist government, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayed in the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economic situation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small business and petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successful entrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern par…
Creating and Refining Boundaries – Church Splitting Among Pentecostal Vietnamese Migrants in Berlin
"The Daughters Have Grown Up" Transnational Motherhood, Migration and Gender Among Catholic Nuns
This article explores transnational spiritual motherhood in women’s congregations from a historical and anthropological perspective, considering the question as to how ideas of motherhood have changed across geographic borders and over an extended period of time. Within a religious context, kinship terms (mother, sister, daughter) are based not on biological, but on ritual relationships. In the past, social contact to biological parents and to th…
Socialist cosmopolitanism meets global Pentecostalism: Charismatic Christianity among Vietnamese migrants after the fall of the Berlin Wall
By focusing on Pentecostal charismatic Christianity, this article explores the encounter of Vietnamese boat people in former West Germany with their political counterparts, Vietnamese contract workers in former East Germany and those from ex-COMECON countries, who became asylum seekers in reunified Germany. It argues that Vietnamese migrants, formerly divided by different political attitudes and experiences, create social relations by joining glo…
Traveling Spirits
Introduction Gertrud Huwelmeier and Kristine Krause 1. Traveling Spirits: Unconcealment and Undisplacement Michael Lambek 2. Haunted by Spirits: Balancing Religious Commitment and Moral Obligations in Haitian Transnational Social Fields Heike Drotbohm 3. Spirited Migrations: The Travels of Len Dong Spirits and Their Mediums Karen Fjelstad 4. Ghanaian Pentecostal Prophets: Transnational Travel and (Im-)Mobility Girish Daswani 5. Religious Media, M…
When people are broadcast their ethnographies. Text, mass media and voices from the field
After the publication of my ethnography on the dual organisation of a German village, I returned to the field to present it to the people. Villagers invited the local press to write about the book presentation. When a review article appeared in a national newspaper, television and radio stations tried to establish contacts with the villagers as well as with myself. The paper will reflect upon the complexity of power and representation, and will i…
"Nach Amerika!" Schwestern ohne Grenzen
Ordensfrauen unterwegs. Transnationalismus, Gender und Religion
When people are broadcast their ethnographies. Text, mass media and voices from the field
Frauentöne – Männerstimmen: Konkurrenz, Konflikt und Kooperation zwischen den Geschlechtern
Traveling Spirits
Introduction Gertrud Huwelmeier and Kristine Krause 1. Traveling Spirits: Unconcealment and Undisplacement Michael Lambek 2. Haunted by Spirits: Balancing Religious Commitment and Moral Obligations in Haitian Transnational Social Fields Heike Drotbohm 3. Spirited Migrations: The Travels of Len Dong Spirits and Their Mediums Karen Fjelstad 4. Ghanaian Pentecostal Prophets: Transnational Travel and (Im-)Mobility Girish Daswani 5. Religious Media, M…
Socialist cosmopolitanism meets global Pentecostalism: Charismatic Christianity among Vietnamese migrants after the fall of the Berlin Wall
By focusing on Pentecostal charismatic Christianity, this article explores the encounter of Vietnamese boat people in former West Germany with their political counterparts, Vietnamese contract workers in former East Germany and those from ex-COMECON countries, who became asylum seekers in reunified Germany. It argues that Vietnamese migrants, formerly divided by different political attitudes and experiences, create social relations by joining glo…
Cell phones for the spirits: Ancestor Worship and Ritual Economies in Vietnam and Its Diasporas
Religion has been thriving in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since đổi mới, the onset of market reforms in the late 1980s. Votive paper offerings, part of spiritual and economic well-being, play a crucial role in performing religious practices in the socialist country as well as among diasporic Vietnamese. In urban Hanoi, material objects made from paper are traded in marketplaces and later burned in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in pri…
Market Shrines and Urban Renewal in Hanoi
Feeding the spirits: Cooking, offering and reclaiming lộc in late socialist Vietnam
Food is intrinsic to Vietnamese ritual activities. Religious practices involve cooking for ancestors and the presentation of food to deities, spirits of national heroes, tutelary spirits, as well as to wandering ghosts of war dead at various localities and in multiple contexts. In conjunction with food offerings, people burn incense and transmit prayers at altars and shrines, and in a response, spirits bestow lộc, blessed food, which is then dist…
Creating and Refining Boundaries – Church Splitting Among Pentecostal Vietnamese Migrants in Berlin
Spirit map and medium's message: Searching for war dead in Vietnam
Popular religious practices such as communicating with the deceased take place in many parts of the world. In cases of death through violence, as in warfare, the living worry about the dead bodies of their loved ones as the lack of bodily remains makes it impossible to perform a proper burial. Vietnam is a valuable case study because it has experienced terrible violence in the 20th century. This article explores the pilgrimage of a group of broth…
Spirit Writing in Vietnam: Political Lessons from the Beyond
Spirit writing is a rare form of trance mediumship in contemporary urban Hanoi and part of the resurgence of popular religious practices in late Socialist Vietnam. This article explores the transmission of otherworldly messages from heroic political and military leaders of the past via an urban female spirit medium and examines practices of translation, decoding and implementing celestial directives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper inv…
Socialist Cosmopolitans in Postsocialist Europe
Prior to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, thousands of students and tens of thousands of contract workers from Vietnam arrived in socialist ‘fraternal’ countries. A number of them established social and economic relations with locals, compatriots, and migrants from various socialist states in the Cold War period, although they had been discouraged by Vietnamese authorities in creating close personal ties with ‘foreigners’ in general. …
Bazaar Pagodas – Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialistgovernment, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayedin the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economicsituation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small businessand petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successfulentrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern parts of…
Performing Intimacy with God: Spiritual Experiences in Vietnamese Diasporic Pentecostal Networks
Journal Article Performing Intimacy with God: Spiritual Experiences in Vietnamese Diasporic Pentecostal Networks Get access Gertrud Hüwelmeier Gertrud Hüwelmeier Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 32, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 414–430, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghu062 Published: 11 August 2014
Frauentöne – Männerstimmen: Konkurrenz, Konflikt und Kooperation zwischen den Geschlechtern
When people are broadcast their ethnographies. Text, mass media and voices from the field
"Nach Amerika!" Schwestern ohne Grenzen
Ordensfrauen unterwegs. Transnationalismus, Gender und Religion
When people are broadcast their ethnographies. Text, mass media and voices from the field
After the publication of my ethnography on the dual organisation of a German village, I returned to the field to present it to the people. Villagers invited the local press to write about the book presentation. When a review article appeared in a national newspaper, television and radio stations tried to establish contacts with the villagers as well as with myself. The paper will reflect upon the complexity of power and representation, and will i…
Traveling Spirits
Introduction Gertrud Huwelmeier and Kristine Krause 1. Traveling Spirits: Unconcealment and Undisplacement Michael Lambek 2. Haunted by Spirits: Balancing Religious Commitment and Moral Obligations in Haitian Transnational Social Fields Heike Drotbohm 3. Spirited Migrations: The Travels of Len Dong Spirits and Their Mediums Karen Fjelstad 4. Ghanaian Pentecostal Prophets: Transnational Travel and (Im-)Mobility Girish Daswani 5. Religious Media, M…
Socialist cosmopolitanism meets global Pentecostalism: Charismatic Christianity among Vietnamese migrants after the fall of the Berlin Wall
By focusing on Pentecostal charismatic Christianity, this article explores the encounter of Vietnamese boat people in former West Germany with their political counterparts, Vietnamese contract workers in former East Germany and those from ex-COMECON countries, who became asylum seekers in reunified Germany. It argues that Vietnamese migrants, formerly divided by different political attitudes and experiences, create social relations by joining glo…
"The Daughters Have Grown Up" Transnational Motherhood, Migration and Gender Among Catholic Nuns
This article explores transnational spiritual motherhood in women’s congregations from a historical and anthropological perspective, considering the question as to how ideas of motherhood have changed across geographic borders and over an extended period of time. Within a religious context, kinship terms (mother, sister, daughter) are based not on biological, but on ritual relationships. In the past, social contact to biological parents and to th…
Bazaar Pagodas – Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialistgovernment, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayedin the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economicsituation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small businessand petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successfulentrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern parts of…
Bazaar Pagodas – Transnational Religion, Postsocialist Marketplaces and Vietnamese Migrant Women in Berlin
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the East German Socialist government, thousands of former contract workers from Vietnam stayed in the then reunified Germany. Due to their resulting precarious economic situation, a large number of these migrants became engaged in small business and petty trade. Some of them, women in particular, have become successful entrepreneurs and wholesalers in recently built bazaars in the eastern par…
Creating and Refining Boundaries – Church Splitting Among Pentecostal Vietnamese Migrants in Berlin
Performing Intimacy with God: Spiritual Experiences in Vietnamese Diasporic Pentecostal Networks
Journal Article Performing Intimacy with God: Spiritual Experiences in Vietnamese Diasporic Pentecostal Networks Get access Gertrud Hüwelmeier Gertrud Hüwelmeier Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 32, Issue 3, September 2014, Pages 414–430, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghu062 Published: 11 August 2014
Cell phones for the spirits: Ancestor Worship and Ritual Economies in Vietnam and Its Diasporas
Religion has been thriving in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since đổi mới, the onset of market reforms in the late 1980s. Votive paper offerings, part of spiritual and economic well-being, play a crucial role in performing religious practices in the socialist country as well as among diasporic Vietnamese. In urban Hanoi, material objects made from paper are traded in marketplaces and later burned in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in pri…
Socialist Cosmopolitans in Postsocialist Europe
Prior to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, thousands of students and tens of thousands of contract workers from Vietnam arrived in socialist ‘fraternal’ countries. A number of them established social and economic relations with locals, compatriots, and migrants from various socialist states in the Cold War period, although they had been discouraged by Vietnamese authorities in creating close personal ties with ‘foreigners’ in general. …
Market Shrines and Urban Renewal in Hanoi
Spirit Writing in Vietnam: Political Lessons from the Beyond
Spirit writing is a rare form of trance mediumship in contemporary urban Hanoi and part of the resurgence of popular religious practices in late Socialist Vietnam. This article explores the transmission of otherworldly messages from heroic political and military leaders of the past via an urban female spirit medium and examines practices of translation, decoding and implementing celestial directives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper inv…
Spirit map and medium's message: Searching for war dead in Vietnam
Popular religious practices such as communicating with the deceased take place in many parts of the world. In cases of death through violence, as in warfare, the living worry about the dead bodies of their loved ones as the lack of bodily remains makes it impossible to perform a proper burial. Vietnam is a valuable case study because it has experienced terrible violence in the 20th century. This article explores the pilgrimage of a group of broth…
Feeding the spirits: Cooking, offering and reclaiming lộc in late socialist Vietnam
Food is intrinsic to Vietnamese ritual activities. Religious practices involve cooking for ancestors and the presentation of food to deities, spirits of national heroes, tutelary spirits, as well as to wandering ghosts of war dead at various localities and in multiple contexts. In conjunction with food offerings, people burn incense and transmit prayers at altars and shrines, and in a response, spirits bestow lộc, blessed food, which is then dist…
Colonial Ghosts, the French Cemetery and Urban Renewal in Hanoi
After the end of the colonial regime in Vietnam, the French Cemetery in Hanoi was levelled to make way for newly planned collective apartment blocks. Due to rural migration to the city and the subsequent housing shortage in the 1960s, people settled there, some occupying the lower rooms of the mortuary as accommodation. Humans were not the only residents; they cohabited with wandering ghosts of tirailleurs Sénégalais, French colonial soldiers fro…
On the Banks of the Red River - Urban Renewal, Public Art, and Environmentalism in Late Socialist Hanoi
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
The Sacred Cowshed Tree in Urban Hanoi: A Home for Unredeemed Souls
The “Cowshed Tree” (Cây đa nhà Bò), located next to a maternity hospital in urban Hanoi, has long been a destination for women and men who offer prayers to ensure a successful birth and to give thanks for a healthy baby. As the nearby hospital also performs abortions, the crown of the huge banyan tree with its aerial roots has come to be regarded by many city residents as a home for unredeemed souls. But the history of the tree and narratives abo…
Face Masks for the Ancestors: Everyday Life and Death during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Urban Hanoi
This essay examines the everyday life and death of residents in urban Hanoi during the fourth wave of the pandemic in the summer of 2021. The article considers how city dwellers developed manifold creative strategies to deal with government requirements and argue that part of the population developed tactics of survival to circumvent prescribed rules in coping with the pandemic. But it was not just the living who were affected by the virus. The d…
Sociology (17 works) · History (14 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Vietnamese (8 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (7 works)