The New School for Social Research's Annual Heuss Lecture features Professor Richard Rottenburg delivering a talk entitled "Anthropology, Critique, and Hope".

For long time anthropology had a penchant for examining other worlds, thereby indirectly critiquing the Western world. Since the late 1980s this shifted and a critical anthropology emerged, which directly interrogated citadels of Western modernity. Anthropology, however, entered this critical intellectual debate at a moment in history when other disciplines were about to abandon it due to a more radical rendering of critique.

Scholarship in the emerging field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) asserted since the 1980s that the realities manufactured by science and technology have to be analyzed symmetrically to cultural realities, subjecting both to the same critique. This reflexive shift was a double-edged sword; it could not spare its own outcomes from imputations of contingency. STS bashfully needs to assume an Archimedean point placed outside the world to observe this world, yet simultaneously vehemently denies that such an external point of view can be accessible to human endeavor at all. Post-critical anthropology offers new versions of postmodern and postcolonial modesty in dealing with this aporia. This lecture examines the remaining space of critique and offers an outlook on the possibilities of a post-critical critique.

Richard Rottenburg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Halle, Germany, and lives in Berlin. Through the years, he preserved his ethnographic base camp on Mount Lebu in Sudan since 1979, which grounds him into a different world. He is known for having introduced Science and Technology Studies into German anthropology and for having established the “Law, Organization, Science and Technology Research Group” (LOST) from which several cutting-edge young scholars are being recruited to leading positions. For the academic year 2014/15, he is the Heuss-Professor at the New School for Social Research.

Sponsored by The New School for Social Research.