Dr. Tim Burger

I am a social anthropologist with a special interest in economic practices, agriculture, environment, and value. My publications so far concern human-animal relations, spatial transformation, and the state; I have also coedited collections on feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, on the role of literature in the ethnographic imagination, and on field methodology. My fieldwork is regionally centred in peripheral Europe and the Lusophone Atlantic with an additional focus on Java, Indonesia.

In my current postdoctoral project, I am working on the relation between vigilance and class formation among Azorean migrants in the United States. I hope to better understand how social class is ‘relational’ and what role watchfulness plays in facilitating upward mobility, enacting difference, and mitigating the manifestations of inequality.

My doctoral thesis Cultivating Lost Land: Livelihood and Depopulation on São Jorge Island, Azores (University of Cambridge, 2024) examines how demographic decline is understood, evaluated and lived out in a small village marked by high levels of transatlantic mobility. I analyse how depopulation affects farming, exchange, masculinity, and religious feasting. Before that, I studied at the London School of Economics (MSc, 2018) and LMU Munich (B.A., 2016), where I was subsequently also a lecturer. My education and research have been supported by the ESRC, DAAD, German Academic National Fund, the Max Weber-Programme, and a Vice-Chancellors Award by the University of Cambridge.

Selected Publications:

• 2024 The Multi-Sided Ethnographer: Living the Field Beyond Research. Bielefeld: Transcript. (Edited volume; with Usman Mahar, Pascale Schild and Anna-Maria Walter)
• 2023 „Men Who Shout at Goats: Agrarian Cultivation and Gendered Slaughter on an Azorean Island.” Social Analysis 67 (2): 1-22.
• 2023 Researching Capitalism: For a Feminist Approach to the Study of Capitalism / Für einen Feministischen Ansatz zur Erforschung des Kapitalismus. Boasblogs. (Edited blog series; with Gabriela Cabaña and Juliane Müller)
• 2021 „Ethnographie und Repräsentation: Einführung in ein Verhältnis zwischen Autorität und Krise.“ Working Papers in Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich, Volume 28. (with Martin Sökefeld)
• 2020 „Ein erwünschter Staat? Dezentralisierung im urbanen Java als Staatsbildung ‚von unten‘.“ Paideuma 66: 101-126.