Workshop 38

Conceptualising and Researching Diversity

Diversity has become a major issue in the social sciences; as an outcome of globalisation, societies have become more diverse and social classifications have become more heterogeneous. Despite efforts to describe these overlapping classifications, methodologies to research and conceptualise diversities are still open to debate. In particular many traditional social science categories appear too narrow and limiting to capture the complexities of increased social diversifications. Social Anthropology has been at the forefront of opening up traditional concepts, in particular that of culture and society. The questioning of conventional categories and units of research (e.g. ethnicity, locality), however, asks for new methodological and theoretical solutions.

Once we unfold these social complexities, we have to find new units of analysis in order not to get dispersed in the reference structures of social fields. At the same time it is clearly impossible to return to the traditional taken-for-granted units of ethnographic analysis (the village, the tribe, the culture). In this workshop we invite anthropologists to present their conceptual, methodological and empirical solutions to the dilemmas of researching and conceptualising social diversity. We would like to discuss questions such as: How are research units defined? How does the selection of some factors (e.g. social classifications, localities, groups) relate to others that have been ignored? How can we conceptualise interactions, overlaps and contradictions between different social classifications? How do people in the field themselves deal with the dilemmas of social diversity?

Gabriele Alex, alex@mmg.mpg.de
Goran Janev, janev@mmg.mpg.de
Boris Nieswand, nieswand@mmg.mpg.de
Monika Palmberger, palmberger@mmg.mpg.de
Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften, Abteilung für soziokulturelle Vielfalt

Termin / Raum

Mittwoch, 30.09.2009, 15.00 bis 16.45 Uhr und 17.15 bis 19.00 Uhr / Raum 0.254 (Hauptgebäude)

Vorträge inkl. Abstracts als pdf

Paola Ivanov : Cosmopolitanism realized? Culture of Translocality and Appropriation of Difference in Zanzibar

Gunther Dietz: Researching the Grammar of Diversity: An Ethnography of an “Interculturalizing” Higher Education Institution in Mexico

Christoph Brumann: Consensus Analysis Reloaded: Tracing the Diversity of Preferences and Opinions

Ulrike Niedner: “Cultural Diversity” – Notes on the International Debate on a Buzzword

Goran Janev: Reducing Ethnicity or Ethnic Reductionism in Macedonia