Peter Berger Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion, University of Groningen Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: June 2025 Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: »Theorizing Cultural Change« Project outline: The project intends to make a contribution to the proposed research program on »Religion and De:Toxification« in two interrelated ways. First, by considering the relevance and applicability of anthropological theories of cultural change. The processes that are going to be investigated in the »Religion and De:Toxification« program concern situations in which certain actors, practices, objects, institutions or ideas are considered as »toxic« (bad, destructive, dangerous etc.) from the point of view of particular societal actors or communities. Such classifications often entail measures that intend to change or »cure« the phenomena so assessed, which may result in value-conflicts or even violence. Significantly, these processes have a time dimension, i.e. they may evolve slowly or they can erupt suddenly. I consider the theoretical framework of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (among other scholars) to be very fruitful for analyzing such complex processes, as he distinguishes different forms of (historical) agency and demonstrated how configurations of ideas can shift in the context of powerful (historical) events that also often involve either amplification or downscaling. Second, with regard to the area of my ethnographic research, I will investigate a concrete case, which involves multiple dimensions and relations of toxic ascriptions. Certain religious and cultural practices of Indigenous communities of Odisha (India) such as animal sacrifices, beef and alcohol consumption have since long been regarded as »backward« and »harmful« by Hindu lowlanders and one way to »remedy« this has been public school education that systematically targets such practices and offers »feasible alternatives« acceptable for the societal mainstream. More recently, educational institutions, especially so-called »factory schools« have come under severe criticism from activists in particular and have been accused of destroying Indigenous cultures and lifestyles. Corporate mining in the same area that involves the toxic in a very real sense further complicates this situation. (Peter Berger) Research partner: Peter Berger is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Roland Hardenberg, Director of the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropological at Goethe University. His stay is funded by Goethe University's interdisciplinary field of potential »Religion and De:Toxification (RelTox)«. Scholarly profile of Peter BergerPeter Berger is Associate Professor of Indian Religions and the Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Since 2007 he works in Groningen at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society in the Department of Comparative Study of Religion, which he chaired for six years (2014−2019). Before coming to the Netherlands he taught at the Free University of Berlin (2001−2007). He was Mercator Visiting Professor at the Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt (2023), Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, University of Munich (2015), and Visiting Professor at the University of Zürich (2012). His ethnographic research focusses on the Indigenous (Adivasi) communities of a highland region in Central India called Eastern Ghats, belonging to the state of Odisha. Since 1996 he has conducted more than two and a half years of research in this area in total and most of his research interests derive from this long-term ethnographic engagement. His last book (Subaltern Sovereigns, 2023) is an attempt to unravel indigenous understandings of sovereignty and royal rule based on a comparative investigation of local festivals.Websites: Please find more information about Peter Berger here, about the Groningen Institute of Indian Studies here and about the project on Cereal Cultures in which he is involved together with Roland Hardenberg here. Contact: Main areas of research: Regional: India, especially the highlands of Odisha in Central India; thematic: Ritual, religion, values, social structure, food, death, agriculture, education, cultural change, Indigenous communities (Adivasis) of Odisha, history and theory of anthropology.Selected publications:
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