Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

1989 - 2019: Relating Global Histories

Sérgio Costa, Duane Jethro, Bernd Scherer

Abstract

Beyond its national „German-German“ and (Eastern) European significance, the date 1989 points to global dimensions of ruptures, mobilities and transformations related to the post-cold war era. This dimension was addressed in a publication of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2009 (1989. Globale Geschichten). In what ways is 1989 - as a historical caesura - still relevant today, 30 years after the fall of the wall(s), to map out entangled histories in a global present? And how can such mapping open windows on imagining the future? The panel discussion will address these questions with a specific focus on Latin American and South African perspectives. 

Introduction by Bernd Scherer (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, HU Berlin), inputs by Sergio Costa (Lateinamerika-Institut FU Berlin) and Duane Jethro (Centre of Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, HU Berlin).


Bios
Trained in economics and sociology in Brazil and Germany, Sérgio Costa is a professor of sociology and the director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His areas of research are postcolonial sociologies, inequality research, conviviality and difference. His most recent books include A Port in Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2019, co-authored with G. L. Gonçalves); Del Atlántico al Pacífico Negro (From the Black Atlantic to the the Black Pacific, Vervuert, 2019, co-authored with M. Góngora-Mera and R. Vera Santos) and Global Entangled Inequalities (Routledge, 2018, edited with E. Jelin and R. C. Motta).

Duane Jethro is a post-doctoral research fellow working in the Making Differences project at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research looks at the mobilisation of post-colonial and decolonial language in the context of contested street renaming, heritage commodification, as well as heritage aesthetics and social difference in Berlin. He is a graduate of the University of Utrecht and an Associate Research Fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, where held a post-doctoral research fellowship in 2016.  He is a regular contributor to the online blog Africasacountry and has published in Material Religion, African Diaspora and Tourist Studies and the International Journal of Heritage Studies. His book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa is published by Bloomsbury Academic. 

Bernd Scherer has been Director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, since 2006 and has held an honorary professorship at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin since 2011. His central areas of work lie in philosophy, semiotics, aesthetics and intercultural questions. He has initiated and headed a series of international cultural projects, including “Über Lebenskunst” (2010–2011), an initiative project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with HKW. Since 2012, Scherer has headed “The Anthropocene Project” and, since 2014, the project “100 Years of Now,” both at HKW. He is curating the Dictionary of Now as part of the latter project. Parallel to this, he is overseeing the conceptual development of HKW’s third large-scale project, “The New Alphabet.” In his tenure at HKW, Scherer has guided its conceptual development from an institution that presented non-European cultures into one dedicated to the “curating of ideas in the making,” in a world that is changing not only globally, but also in planetary terms. Publications: coeditor  together with Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol of “Textures of the Anthropocene. Grain Vapor Ray”. MIT Press 2014; coeditor of “Das Anthropozän. Zum Stand der Dinge”. Berlin 2015; editor of the series: “Bibliothek 100 Jahre Gegenwart”. Berlin 2016-2019.