Headed by Prof. Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets, the Department of Law and Anthropology was established in 2012 to focus on the effects of societies and cultures towards law and politics and vice versa. This department also carefully looks how scholars of this specific discipline can and should take responsibility for implications surrounding the interplay of these societal factors.
Headed by Prof. Dr. Chris Hann, the Department of Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia is concerned with the interaction of economics, politics and anthropology within Eurasia. Research sub-groups are focusing and have done studies on kinship, historical anthropology, economic anthropology, urban anthropology, culture and socialism, and citizenship.
Anthropology of Politics and Governance
Headed by Prof. Dr. Ursula Rao, the Department of Anthropology of Politics and Governance brings together a group of successful scholars undertaking research in form of in-depth case studies in Asia, Africa and Europe about the tactics, strategies, and motivations that shape political action in times of perceived crisis to study programmes and initiatives that aim to shape the future by proposing new ways of managing complexity and caring for relations in a more-than-human world.
Integration and Conflict
Headed by Prof. Dr. Günther Schlee, the Department of Integration and Conflict focuses on social systems particularly based on identification and differentiation among groups. The department looks into the holistic elements that build ethnic identity through kinship, friendship, language, history, religion, and how ethnicity plays a role across social systems at individual and supra-individual levels.
Anthropology of Economic Experimentation
Headed by Prof. Dr. Biao Xiang, the Department of Anthropology of Economic Experimentation focuses on a wide range of political economy issues, including state-society relations, labour, social reproduction, and mobility governance, through the lens of migration.
In January 2017, the Department of Law and Anthropology has invited the controversial American activist and political scientistNorman Finkelstein as a visiting scholar. The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology has thus been criticized for providing a platform for a controversial speaker. In a statement the Max Planck Institute said that the purpose of Finkelstein's invitation to the Institute was to engage in a dialogue with him to discuss his work within an academic context. The research institute is dedicated to basic research where controversy cannot be ruled out; controversy is a “trait of academic work”.
