Guest Talk Judith Beyer
How do we listen in anthropology?
18.05.2026 at 16:15
18 May 2026, 16.15
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Oettingenstraße 67
80538 München
Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer (Universität Konstanz):
How do we listen in anthropology?
Abstract
In my talk I will be speaking about the undertheoretization of listening in our anthropological method's toolkit that has always prioritized seeing (evidenced in the term 'participant observation'). After exploring what anthropology (and adjacent disciplines) have had to say so far about listening, I will draw on insights from my own ethnographic fieldwork in rural Northern Kyrgyzstan, from fieldwork in urban Yangon in Myanmar and from ongoing multi-sited fieldwork in Europe. My aim is to complicate the implicit parallelization of listening and understanding in our anthropological work and to offer a possible way of differently theorizing what is happening when we listen to others. This will involve a plunge into the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s teaching on the issue. Next to scrutinizing and complicating the ways in which we listen to others in anthropology, my aim is also to come up with suggestions how to expand our method’s toolkit.
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