Obituary

Elfriede Hermann at her adoption ceremony into the Rewi family, Nuku, Rabi Island (Fiji), on 1 January 1998, with her new sister Kaia on the left and her mother Katake on the right. Photo: Wolfgang Kempf Elfriede Hermann, a deeply passionate anthropologist of Oceania and an exceptionally dedicated university teacher, supervisor and mentor passed away on 17 February 2025, in Göttingen, Germany, at the age of 64. For the last 2 years of her life, a protracted and insidious illness increasingly weakened her. Despite having a serious health condition, Elfriede remained steadfast in her commitment to academic research, teaching and supervision. As Professor of General Anthropology with an Asia-Pacific focus at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen, she continued to be involved in academia as best as she could. Her untimely passing tragically erased her plans for a rich and productive retirement, during which she had hoped to prepare vast amounts of research data for publication. Throughout her career, Elfriede maintained a keen interest in and love for the Pacific and its people, a passion she shared with her husband and research partner Wolfgang Kempf. Within the academic community, she is widely known for her anthropological work on identity, emotions, displacement, transnational mobility and belonging, as well as climate change in the Pacific. Yet those who had the privilege of knowing her personally will also remember her kind manner as well as her perceptive and attentive nature. Elfriede grew up in Wagenhofen, a village near Neuburg an der Donau, a charming town in Upper Bavaria north of Munich. She was raised with a younger brother and enjoyed a sheltered upbringing. Her parents ran a small but successful construction business. During her high school days, Elfriede and her friends formed a close-knit circle that lasted throughout her life, despite her being away for long periods during her fieldwork. Among these friends was Wolfgang. According to her friends, Elfriede had a talent for learning foreign languages, and they also spoke of her enthusiasm for trying out new practical skills such as pottery. No matter how long it took, Elfriede would never give up until she mastered whatever it was she was learning. And even though her small world had so much to offer, Elfriede would always be on the lookout for something new and for what the wider world might have in store for her. Elfriede's intellectual curiosity was nurtured early on by her grandfather Michael Eckstein, a primary school teacher who was also a volunteer local historian (a Heimatpfleger) and an enthusiastic archaeologist. Elfriede caught his passion for archaeology, so much so that she not only participated in prehistoric excavations in France after her graduation from high school in 1979 but also decided to study prehistory—along with folklore studies and social and cultural anthropology (Völkerkunde)—when she enrolled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University München (Munich) in 1980. However, her fascination with ‘digging up stones and sherds’ gradually gave way to a desire to engage more directly with living people. In 1982, after a brief period majoring in social and cultural anthropology in Munich, Elfriede and Wolfgang transferred to the University of Tübingen to pursue their academic interests. One year later, Elfriede and Wolfgang embarked on their first explorative fieldtrip to Australia, searching for a suitable research location for their master's research. In Queensland, they visited the Aboriginal reserve of Yarrabah and conducted interviews on culture change and land rights. On the spur of the moment, they booked a tourist flight to nearby Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. There they connected with students from the University of Papua New Guinea and received an invitation to visit the Rai Coast, the home of several of those students. This marked the beginning of one of those classic anthropological journeys of falling in love with places and people. Elfriede and Wolfgang returned to the Rai Coast 2 years later to conduct 7 months of fieldwork among the Ngaing people and to assemble an ethnographic collection for their anthropological institute in Tübingen (1985–1986). Elfriede's ability to focus her research on the history of the Yali movement, a taboo topic that nobody in the community was keen to talk about, least with European strangers, is a testament to her gentle personality, her endless patience and her unwavering kindness. These qualities allowed her to build friendships and trust with even the most reluctant interlocutors. Through Peter Lawrence's work, Road Belong Cargo, the Yali movement had become famous/infamous far beyond a narrow anthropological community. It was commonly referred to as a ‘cargo cult’, a term rooted in a colonial context as a convenient label for Melanesian movements often characterised by their followers' expectations that they could obtain western material goods—cargo—through ritual means. The Ngaing strongly rejected this characterisation and insisted that Yali's movement was by no means a ‘cargo cult’ but a reform project aimed at wide-ranging social transformations. Elfriede approached this highly emotional discourse with great empathy and was able to convince her research partners that the Yali movement had a history that was worth being told, and that she could tell it in a way that respected Ngaing sensibilities and apprehensions. Her thesis Nem bilong‚ Kago Kalt'em i tambu tru! earned her a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Tübingen in 1988. But this was only the beginning of Elfriede's sustained critique of the anthropological and colonial ‘cargo cult’ category. In the same year, Elfriede returned to the Rai Coast for 16 months of fieldwork for her doctoral research, with a focus on the correlation between emotions and historicity in the context of the Yali movement. During this research Elfriede developed a keen interest in ethnopsychology, emotional discourse, cultural constructions of self and other, discourse analysis, agency and historicity. These themes became life-long research interests that also fuelled her subsequent research projects across different locales in the Pacific region. Her attention to the power and importance of emotions developed out of her conversations and observations in the field and preceded a more general interest in emotions that was sparked by the collection of essays edited by Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod in 1990, Language and the Politics of Emotion. With her doctoral thesis, Emotions and Historicity. The Emotional Discourse about the Yali Movement in a Ngaing Community, Papua New Guinea (Hermann, 1995, our translation of German title), Elfriede received her PhD from the University of Tübingen. Thomas Hauschild, one of her supervisors, praised her work as ‘one of the few truly important fieldwork-based current studies of younger German-speaking anthropologists’ (Hauschild, 1995, our translation). In her subsequent publications on the Yali movement, as well as in the classes she taught, Elfriede vehemently opposed usage of the term ‘cargo cult’. She advocated for ‘centralising Pacific Islanders’ views and voices, histories and cultural practices' (Hermann et al., 2024), arguing that ‘cargo cult’ was not a neutral scientific concept but a colonial construct rooted in binary oppositions that positioned cultural differences between Europeans as the Self and Melanesians as the Other (Hermann, 1992b, 1995, 1997, 2002, 2004a). Because, as noted, her Ngaing interlocutors considered ‘cargo cult’ to be offensive, Elfriede, inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, suggested writing ‘cargo cult’ sous rature (crossed out) to signal that it was inappropriate but indispensable for critical reflections (Hermann, 2004a). In later publications, Elfriede used distancing quotation marks to signal the inappropriateness of the term (Hermann, 2013). Elfriede deepened her research interest in ethnopsychology and dreams in a joint research project with Wolfgang from 1999 to 2003. Building on findings from their earlier fieldwork on the Rai coast (1985–1986, 1988–1990, 1996), they studied cultural conceptions of dreaming and dream interpretation among the Ngaing (Kempf & Hermann, 2003). After obtaining her PhD, Elfriede joined the University of Göttingen as a research and teaching assistant at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the only anthropological institute in Germany with a focus on Oceania from its foundation in 1935/36—and in pertinent lectures even before that—until today. She held this position for 6 years, from 1995 to 2001, during which time she was expected to develop and carry out her habilitation project, as is common for academic careers at German universities. Encouraged by her supervisor to establish a second research fieldsite within Oceania, Elfriede conducted her postdoctoral research from 1997 to 1998 among Banaban islanders in Fiji. The Banabans had been relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji after World War II when their home island Banaba, part of the atoll state Kiribati in Micronesia, had been ecologically ruined due to extensive phosphate mining. While this research resonated well with major themes in the anthropology of Oceania of the time—such as travelling, diaspora and transnationalism—Elfriede also brought her own theoretical interests and perspectives to her new field. With her Ngaing research in mind, she looked into the effective force that emotions had in processes of self-constitution among the Banabans. She explored the ways in which emotions articulated displacement from Banaba as well as placement in Fiji. It was in this context that ‘agency’ emerged as another focal point in Elfriede's research. As a result, Elfriede began to study agency in relation to emotional discourse, a line of inquiry that she returned to in her later research on climate change. She also continued to be interested in self–other constructions when studying how the Banabans fashioned their individual and collective identity in relation to the cultural differences they perceived vis-à-vis other ethnicities living in Fiji but also vis-à-vis I-Kiribati. Contributing to scholarship on the social construction of difference and building on approaches stemming from ethnopsychology, research on ethnicity and gender studies, Elfriede focused on the cultural discourses and practices of the Banaban in the intercultural Fijian context, in which ethnicity had become increasingly politically explosive. She showed that the constitution of person/self and ethnicity was a complex, reciprocal process (Hermann, 2006). From 2002 to 2004, Elfriede was awarded a fellowship from the German Research Council, which allowed her to expand her research interest to the close relationship between historicity, ethnicity and emotions, studying how historicity and ethnicity were formed through the efficacy of emotions among the Banabans in Fiji. Building on the capacity of emotions to signal the relevance of past events and make them physically tangible, Elfriede analysed written, oral and performative expressions of history. She demonstrated how Banabans articulated knowledge of the past, as relevantly indexed by emotions, with an awareness of their ethnic selfhood in the past and present (Hermann, 2005, 2011c). Furthermore, she revealed how Banabans cultivated a close attachment to their home island, expressed through and passed on to the next generation through emotions (Hermann & Tebitaki Kokoria, 2005). In 2005, Elfriede co-edited a special volume with Wolfgang titled Relations in Multicultural Fiji, which brings together discussions of how actors in Fiji articulate, transform and position relations between past and present, people and land, as well as between people. The contributors highlight that, guided by their interests to shape their identity and place in multicultural Fiji, social actors actively work on these relations (Hermann & Kempf, 2005a, 2005b; Kempf & Hermann, 2005). In preparation for its landmark 2006 exhibition, Life in the Pacific of the 1700s, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawai'i, cooperated closely with the Ethnographic Collection at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Göttingen, which agreed to loan its world-famous Cook/Forster Collection to the academy for the occasion. Following a proposal by Professor Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin (Göttingen), the Academy also sponsored an international symposium in conjunction with the exhibition titled ‘Changing Contexts – Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania’. Elfriede was commissioned to organise the symposium and to edit the subsequent publication (Hermann, 2011a); she was appointed Research Fellow to carry out these tasks (2005–2011). This project was probably one of the most difficult challenges Elfriede faced, not so much because of its academic challenges but due to the highly sensitive politicised context in which both exhibition and symposium took place. The concluding remarks of Hauser-Schäublin (2011, p. 35) in her contribution to the volume give some idea of this contested arena: ‘The temporary “coming home” of the Göttingen collection to the Pacific became, however, involved in new unanticipated contexts, those of local cultural politics with different camps and conflicting interests and this unique return trip after more than 200 years was unfortunately not able to bridge these difficulties’. Navigating this contested terrain, Elfriede needed all her conciliatory and persuasive strengths to bring the symposium and the published volume to a good ending in the sense that neither added fuel to the flames and perhaps even offered some bridges to cross. (Many readers of this journal will be aware that the Cook/Forster Collection was then shipped to Canberra, Australia, for the Cook's Pacific Encounters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2006). With the completion of her Habilitation thesis (Hermann, 2006) Elfriede earned the venia legendi in 2007—the formal qualification to teach and apply for a professorship in German academia. When her academic mentor and supervisor Hauser-Schäublin retired in 2008, a lengthy four-year hiring process for her successor ensued, during which Elfriede was commissioned to fill the vacant position. In 2012, she was appointed chaired Professor of General Anthropology with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region—another example of her perseverance and unfailing optimism. From 2009 onward, Elfriede, together with Wolfgang, developed a new and timely research interest: the cultural perceptions and lived effects of climate change in the Pacific. This was a deliberate and strategic shift intended to not only raise awareness about the ways in which climate change affects Pacific Islanders but also to make anthropology more relevant to major global challenges and thereby strengthen and maintain Oceania as a key region at the institute in Göttingen. At that time, climate change was already a major research field in the natural sciences but had received virtually no attention in anthropology. Just a few years later, the field bourgeoned. Elfriede and Wolfgang found strong support and encouragement to explore an anthropology of climate change in geographer Jon Barnett (Melbourne) and anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup (Copenhagen). Retracing the relocation path of the Banabans, as it were, Elfriede (and Wolfgang) turned to Kiribati for their pioneering new venture. The Pacific atoll state comprises 33 islands, of which Banaba island is one. Discourses on global warming, rising sea levels and extreme weather events circulate on the islands of Kiribati, where the I-Kiribatis' response to them ranges from rejection to intensive discussion. Studying climate change and its effects from a cultural and socio-anthropological perspective, Elfriede and Wolfgang's work (Hermann & Kempf, 2017, 2019; Kempf & Hermann, 2014) illuminates the cultural logics that guide the I-Kiribati in their perceptions of and reactions to climate change and its consequences. Their work shows that adaptation strategies to climate change are deeply embedded within the framework of peoples' historical and cultural conceptualisations of land. As they wrote: ‘The unbroken will of many I-Kiribati to remain in the country and their willingness to actively support adaptation measures are closely related to the cultural conviction that the land and its people have always been blessed with a future’ (Hermann & Kempf, 2019: 307). Continuing to deepen their research interest in belonging, cultural identity and place-making in the Pacific, Elfriede and Wolfgang co-edited Belonging in Oceania (2014) with Toon van Meijl. In their epilogue to the volume, Wolfgang and Elfriede stress the relevance of these issues in the context of climate change. Whether Pacific Islanders ‘relate discourses on the consequences of climate change to their belonging to one or several places, countries and social communities’ (Kempf & Hermann, 2014: 207), projections for an uncertain future affect them all. However, by mobilising their belonging to a particular land and its people or to many places and communities, Pacific Islanders demonstrate capacity for agency and resilience. In her later work, Elfriede emphasised Pacific to to and with climate emotional and that in to the of Kiribati with the their land and their future on it as well as to and from their love of their land and their in (Hermann, The power of emotions to affect agency is also in Elfriede and Wolfgang's study of and culture in relation to climate change (Hermann & Kempf, attention to the ability of to emotions and through them in the context of Kiribati, they that climate be as a the agency of atoll the the global community to Furthermore, the climate that Elfriede and Wolfgang studied the I-Kiribatis' willingness to their future’ (Hermann & Kempf, p. in the of climate change discourses that have a to the small island due to climate consequences. As Elfriede and Wolfgang wrote: this context, and emotions are to transform a of into a capacity for and in to bring about (Hermann & Kempf, Elfriede will be and deeply by her and not only as a love for the people of the Pacific inspired many of her students the years, but also as a and Elfriede was with her time for and support of students and and she to the people her with was not only a that Elfriede in her lectures on fieldwork but an that was much one of her Elfriede the kind of teaching that people to develop and pursue their own interests and in their In the of who was by Elfriede for both her and master's and always the between the world of and encouragement own conversations were on and Fellow anthropologist who a good of with Elfriede, shared this with was an so gentle within a academic and students. She it for students to their by always a in her and through her to individual supervision. The world more gentle people also Elfriede Hermann on Kiribati, in Photo: Wolfgang Kempf our to Wolfgang Kempf, who shared his knowledge of Elfriede's and career, with a of Elfriede's publications, and to the that are also and students who shared their of Elfriede with and the Brigitta to publications by Elfriede Hermann of her

Ceremony · Ethnography · Kinship · Passion · Queer · Sister · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

• Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters

  Jeannette Mageo, Elfriede Hermann•Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural…•2017

  Add to list

• Belonging in Oceania

  Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf et al.•Belonging in Oceania•2014

  Add to list

• “Prophecy from the Past”

  Open Access•Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf•Pacific Climate Cultures•2018

  Add to list

• Mimesis, Ethnopsychology, and Transculturation

  Elfriede Hermann•Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural…•2017

  Add to list

• Communicating with Transculturation

  Open Access•Elfriede Hermann•Journal de la Société des…•2007

  Add to list

• Emotions and the Relevance of the Past

  Elfriede Hermann•History and Anthropology•2005

  Add to list

• Climate Change, Emotions and Religion

  Elfriede Hermann•Anthropological Forum•2020

  Add to list