Winter Semester 2020/2021

Time and Place: Monday, 16:00-18:00, Hartmannstr. 14, Building D1, 00.235

Synopsis: Sociology, economics, psychology and anthropology research human action and society. They have singled out decisions as a particular important phenomenon as the conscious choice between alternatives often seems to be at the root of human action. Furthermore, decision making holds a promise. In making decisions in the right way, man can conduct his behaviour rationally and (possibly) achieve the aims he or she or the community values. It is, therefore, not surprising that many authors have researched decision making. Even though there is some common ground between them, the authors have, however, also highlighted different aspects of decision-making processes and chosen to study decision making from different perspectives. As a corollary of this, a perspective on decision making that would be shared by the social and behavioural sciences does not exist. We will read selected contributions, try to become familiar with their arguments, assess their ideas and try to develop an understanding of decision making. Although we will read texts from different disciplines, the focus will lie on anthropological texts because anthropology’s descriptive approach provides us with detailed studies of decision-making processes and thus provides a good starting point for reflection on decision making.

Additional Information: Mandatory class. No registration is required for this lecture.

Time and Place: Monday, 12:00 – 14:00, digital format

Synopsis: This lecture in comparative anthropology focuses on the influence of cultural factors in decision-making with a focus on Asia but also in a wider perspective. The first part of the course will expose the differences between anthropological and behavioral sciences’ approaches in assessing cultural factors in decision-making. We will then address how religious worldviews and notions of fate and agency shape individual decision-making in various cultural settings. Lastly, the lecture will focus on concrete cases of social institutions build to deal with uncertainty in collective decision-making (through the example of earthquake prediction in China and Japan) as well as on cultural and social tools available for individual and collective decision-making such as divination rituals and drawing lots rituals.

Additional Information: Mandatory class. No registration is required for this lecture.

Lecturer: JProf. Dr. Stéphanie Homola, Dr. Martina Gottwald-Belinic, Dr. Sven Grundmann, Prof. Dr. Dominik Müller, Dr. Dimitri Drettas

Time and Place: Thursday, 10:00-12:00, digital format

Synopsis: This course will focus on the topic of data within the context of interdisciplinary research. Students will work closely with specialists in multiple academic disciplines, who will address qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection and analysis. In particular, students will be encouraged to engage with questions related to ‘meaning’. How, for example, is data treated differently across the Social Sciences? and how do different disciplines assess data in order to create meaning? “Interdisciplinary Methodologies” is intended to familiarize students with a variety of approaches to research in the humanities, including branches of Political Science, Economics, Sociology, and Social and Cultural Anthropology.

Additional Information: Mandatory class. No registration is required for this lecture.

Time and Place: Thursday, 18:00-20:00, hybrid format

Synopsis: The SDAC Guest Lecture Series offers students of the Elite Graduate Program “Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures” the opportunity to learn about cutting edge research from distinguished scholars of socioculturally oriented decision-making studies from across the world. Guests include university-based researchers from a range of disciplines alongside practitioners working at the intersections of academic research and applied decision-making.

Synopsis for Lecture Series: The Workshop Series goes beyond the classes taught in the framework of the Master’s program “Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures” and provides the students with insights from practitioners and selected scholars. Some of the sessions will have the character of workshops, where students can develop and train new sets of skills. Other sessions will introduce the students to new fields of applied research and the frontier of scientific development. In the upcoming winter semester, we offer a diverse program which covers an introduction into behavioral economics, a workshop in Design Thinking and a seminar on artificial intelligence and decision-making in games. At the begin of the semester the topics of the Lecture Series and the times and venues are published online on the SDAC website and offline on posters in our facilities.

Additional Information: Schedule can be found here. Mandatory class. No registration is required for ( SDAC Students) to recieve ECTS points.

Synopsis for IKGF Project Work: The SDAC program maintains a strong partnership with the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities “Fate, Freedom and Prognostication” (IKGF) at FAU. Every semester, IKGF Visiting Fellows (http://www.ikgf.uni-erlangen.de/people.shtml) present their ongoing research during the regular IKGF Lecture Series (Tuesdays, 6-8 pm, schedule to be confirmed). Students are strongly encouraged to attend these lectures to get insight into the academic world and get into contact with international scholars. To foster exchanges with Visiting Fellows, students will work on an essay (3-5 pages) based either on the topic of one of the IKGF Lecture Series, or on a topic of expertise of one of the IKGF Visiting Fellows. Prof. Homola will introduce students to IKGF Fellows and help them choose a relevant topic.

Additional Information: Mandatory class. No registration is required for this lecture. Please discuss the details with your individual Mentor.

For information about IKGF activities and members, check the IKGF website.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Dominik Müller

Time and Place: Thursday, 16:00 – 18:00, classroom teaching, IKGF Room, Hartmannstr. 14, Building D1, 00.235

Synopsis: The concept of “culture” has radically been put into question by many anthropologists and among some representatives of neighboring disciplines. Many categorically oppose the application of “culture” – especially the plural form “cultures” – as an analytic category. This critique has been influential since the 1980s, when the “writing culture debate” unfolded and began to inform various follow-up discussions in the following years. Among the most prominent examples was L. Abu-Lughod’s (1991) plea for “writing against cultures”. However, proponents of these critiques mostly failed to convey their arguments to broader audiences beyond anthropology, post-colonial studies, feminist theory, and anti-racism research. Other disciplines, such as business- and marketing-oriented programs teaching “cultural competence”, often speak about “cultures”, while claiming a right for themselves to authoritatively define, quantify and measure them, and to explain human being’s behavior through culturizing explanatory frameworks. Both types of “culture”-related academic research appear to exist in epistemic worlds far apart from one another. This course introduces SDAC students to some anthropological critiques and enables them to develop their own informed argumentation on whether speaking of “culture(s)” should or should not be sustained.

As a second step, the course delves into the interrelated problem of cultural representation, i.e. the (im-)possibility of speaking and writing adequately about human beings, cultural Others, and other “cultures”. A key topic to be discussed in this regard will be the “representation crisis”, which overlaps with the abovementioned “writing culture debate”, and anthropological responses that seek to deal with this crisis productively.

Finally, the course will turn to the question of anthropological comparison. After reviewing its trajectory dating back to the colonial era, when what colonial scholars imagined as “cultures” where dubiously mapped, measured and in effect produced, we will discuss why early post-colonial anthropology largely gave up comparative research, and on which grounds attempts have been made since the early 2000s to rehabilitate comparison in more nuanced and less epistemologically violent ways.

Additional Information: Mandatory class. No registration is required for this lecture.

Time and Place: Monday, 18:00-20:00, classroom teaching, SDAC Seminar Room, Henkestr. 91,  House 8, 02.276

Synopsis: While globalization mainly is a standardizing program, the comparison issue in cross-cultural aspects has become more and more important. But to compare cultural values or attitudes, we have to assume that defined values representing the particular culture exist and that attitudes are based on reasonable conceptions. The Lecture will focus on different cultural key values from distinct cultural perspectives as well as key problems related to comparing. Besides, suggestions to solve the comparing problem will be discussed too.

Additional Information: Elective course. Final registration is required until the end of the second week of the semester. [If you’re seriously interested in participating in this seminar, please send an E-mail to Prof. Balsiger (philipp.balsiger@fau.de) so we can keep in contact by E-mail. This will guarantee that you will get all the corresponding documents.]

Time and Place: Wednesday, 18:00-20:00, classroom teaching, SDAC Seminar Room, Henkestr. 91,  House 8, 02.276

Synopsis: This elective course offers SDAC students in their first or third semester a potential direction for developing an innovative project idea for an MA thesis under the lecturer’s supervision.

The background of this course is the lecturer’s establishing of a new long-term research agenda within the SDAC framework: It will investigate intersections between technological innovations and changing legal cultures, to be researched in a bottom-up exploratory ethnographic manner in various Asian countries. The course starts from the observation that the rise of “LawTech” (or “LegalTech”) generates far-reaching consequences for the remaking of everyday legal practices, including judicial decision-making, citizens’ interactions with legal institutions, and the work of private law firms. While “robot judges” and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven judicial decision-making are among the more well-known examples that international media enjoy to pick up, the LawTech field offers a wide range of future-oriented research subjects and questions.

The course invites students to begin exploring this newly emerging field, which until now has received little anthropological attention, particularly in non-Western settings. Participants should be strongly interested in anthropological approaches. If after completing the course you wish to write a related MA thesis, you should be willing to conduct fieldwork and experiment with ethnographic methods.

The course includes introductory readings on legal anthropology, the concept of “legal culture(s)” (and critiques thereof), and ethnographic case studies of legalcultural changes in Asia, including secular and Islamic jurisdictions. We will also scrutinize materials provided by the International LegalTech Association (ILTA) and the ASEAN LegalTech Association (ALT). Through this, we will establish the foundations for exploratory research (Grundlagenforschung) – and potential fieldwork for your thesis in the following semesters. After completing the course, students will decide whether to continue this path.

The primary focus is on the Southeast Asian (ASEAN) region, but there is also plenty of space to develop project ideas in other Asian settings (especially China) and beyond Asia. Students from outside the SDAC program (e.g. from Sociology, Area Studies, or Law) can participate if they consider preparing a thesis related to the course topic.

Time and Place: Wednesday, 10:00-12:00, digital format

Synopsis: Human rights are rights held by all human beings equally. They claim universal validity across national, regional and cultural boundaries. Without the aspiration of universalism, the very concept of human rights would cease to make much sense. In retrospect, however, it seems obvious that the historical human rights declarations, starting from the Virginia Bill of Rights (1776), have always displayed aspects of particularism. While headlines, such as “rights of man” or “droits de l’homme” betray an androcentric bias, experiences of people from lower social strata, persons with disabilities, religious and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples and others may have had merely limited, if any, impact on the formulation of human rights declarations. Moreover, the very idea of human rights has attracted objections that it one-sidedly reflects a European worldview or a Western way of life, which allegedly fail to meet the demands of people from other parts of the world. Do we have to conclude that the aspiration of universal human rights is but an empty illusion? Before tackling that central question, we have to define the claims of human rights and their inherent limitations. Subsequently, we will deal with the “textbook version” of the genesis of human rights in comparison to more critical, innovative readings of their historical development. We will analyse the relationship between individual rights and communitarian solidarity and explore the specific “secularity” of human rights claims as opposed to notions of divine rights. Another subject of investigation will be the interrelatedness of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. A question that has found increasing attention is how freedom of religion or belief can be reconciled with claims of gender-equality or the emancipation of sexual minorities. The lecture will furthermore explore possible tensions between human rights and democracy. If there is any time left towards the end, we might also deal with controversial ideas of an evolutionary self-transcendence of humanity towards a “post-humanist” stadium and possible dangers arising from such futuristic visions. The lecture series belongs to the mandatory module “human rights” within the Masters programme “Political Science”. It is also part of the “Human Rights Master” syllabus. Students will have access to background material through “StudOn”.

Additional Information: Elective course. Additional registration via studon is required. More information can be found on Univis.

Lecturer: Dr. Martina Gottwald-Belinic

Time and Place: Wednesday, 12:00-14:00, digital format

Synopsis: Recent changes in economic environment imposed by the new industrial revolution and challenges and economic difficulties confronted by the limitation of globalisation development path pioneered by Euro/American societies since the origins of capitalist is changing view on the world order. Most of the economic scholars and observes turn their focus to transition development in East Asia, especially on remarkably successful development of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and so called “Chinese Model” of economic transition.
This course will give a systematic and insightful view of China’s transformation road on becoming an important player for the global economy. This includes the challenges in labour transformation and readiness of Chinese economy, firms and society in general for economic absorption of new technology trends and catch up with the changes the world economy is facing up to date. The aim of the course is to provide the students the framework for understanding of China’s economy, structural and institutional changes in China and readiness for the new challenges ahead in sustaining past accomplishments and moving towards the modern Chinese economy. Special focus will be given onto soft power and cultural integration into the world economy as well as economic, diplomatic and investment activities of China recent increased expansion abroad.

Additional Information: Elective course. Final registration is required until the end of the second week of the semester.

Lecturer: Dr. Dimitri Drettas

Time and Place: Wednesday, 14:00-16:00, digital format

Synopsis:

This course aims to present and examine the variety of ways used, in the context of traditional Chinese culture, to obtain an awareness of possible situations, or events that have yet to occur, in order to facilitate decision-making processes in the personal, political and economic spheres. Those methods all have in common the importance given to historical precedents and their overreliance on divination. In this perspective, decisions concerning everyday life (wedding, travels, healthcare) or the administrative and diplomatic fields (policy making, war and peace) are viewed as singular events whose optimal conditions can be predicted. Mantic practices such as sorting the Yijing 易經 (Book of Changes) hexagrams, dream interpretation, or horoscopy, are recorded in all major works of Chinese historiography as efficient ways to assess the best choice of action. Narratives from the Zuo Tradition or Sima Qian’s Records constitute pattern-setting models of causality in the worldview of traditional culture, which still informs contemporary Chinese society.
Students will be encouraged to apply their analytical skills and critical thinking to explaining the seemingly contradictory coexistence of modern science and processes inherited from premodern culture, and to question the role played by current repositories of tradition such as almanacs. To that effect, they will be introduced to the common principles of traditional knowledge (cosmology and time reckoning), and to some of the most common techniques practiced nowadays, mainly hexagram sorting and “eight characters fortune
telling” (bazi suanming 八字算命). They will be required to familiarize themselves with two essential methodological tools: Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricolage and Li Ling’s taxonomic work on the set of practices known as “recipes and techniques” (fangshu 方術). The impact of traditional foreknowledge on modern decision-making will be studied through the recurrent coverage, in the Chinese media, of the use of traditional prediction in electoral and commercial strategies, branding and spatial planning, leading to an observation on the relation between officialdom (guanchang 官場) and the necessity to orient oneself in the maze of social life.
Students attending this class will gain an understanding of the cultural background of decision-making in China which will allow them to identify, contextualize and evaluate the rhetoric surrounding official decisions in the Chinese media and political discourse. Moreover, students will be able to recognize the implicit application of traditional methods used to gain knowledge of the invisible, be it actualized or not.

Time and Place: Thursday, 12:00-14:00, digital format

Synopsis: In the early 1970s, design theorist Horst Rittel and urban planner Melvin M. Webber published their treaty “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” in which they discuss why the planning of policies and social, cultural or environmental problem solving cannot succeed. Problems faced by policy-makers are entirely different from problems natural scientists or engineers have to deal with. Many policy problems are wicked problems, which are principally undecidable and for which no scientifically “right” or “wrong” solution exists. Decision-making processes in public policy often follow the course of normative judgments where distinctions between “good” and “bad” dominate the debate. In this course, we discuss approaches of reasoning which could supplement evidence-based decision-making concepts. This form of argumentation enables decision-makers to consider cultural and normative values in their assessment of policy alternatives. Policy advising is more an art and craft rather than a scientifically rigorous technique. Therefore, we will practice ethical reasoning by discussing some specific cases of wicked policy problems.

Additional Information: Elective course. Final registration is required until the end of the second week of the semester.

Time and Place: Tuesday, 16:00-18:00, classroom teaching, SDAC Seminar Room, Henkestr. 91,  House 8, 02.276

Synopsis: Following the end of the Cold War new possibilities of comparing distinct cultures around the world came up. At the same time the possibilities turned to become a need of comparison due to the dramatic development of the global markets. These challenges became the starting point for complete different reflections on cultures. In addition to these contextual constraints postmodern thinking and in its consequence the reappraisal of European colonialism were further notions laying the ground for an intensive discussion on several cultural aspects.
The seminar will mainly focus on three areas that are in discussion for the moment; (a) substantial knowledge of Cultures as e.g. terminological regulations concerning cultural expressions, representations of cultural expressions [rituals, aesthetics, politics], functions of cultures, etc., (b) different models of Cultural Evolution, and (c) such speculations about the further development of cultures (one single, uniform culture? culture of western civilization?)
Literature
‒ Geertz, Clifford (2006) : The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays. New York, Basic Books.
‒ Hatch, E. (1973) : Theories of Man and Culture. New York et al., Columbia University Press.

Additional Information: Elective course. Final registration is required until the end of the second week of the semester. [If you’re seriously interested in participating in this seminar, please send an E-mail to Prof. Balsiger (philipp.balsiger@fau.de) so we can keep in contact by E-mail. This will guarantee that you will get all the corresponding documents.]