PD Dr. Antje Linkenbach-Fuchs

Academic qualification: Habilitation, Social Anthropology, University of Heidelberg; PhD, Sociology, J.W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt; M.A., Social Anthropology, Sociology, Modern Indian Languages and Literatures, University of Heidelberg

Current affiliation: Fellow, Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany; Privatdozentin, University of Heidelberg, Germany; Research member of the M.S. Merian-R.Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS:MP), Delhi (India)

Previous affiliations, visiting and teaching positions: SINUS Markt- und Sozialforschung, Heidelberg, Germany; South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany; University of Tübingen, Germany; University of Bielefeld, Germany: Centre for Modern Oriental Studies Berlin, Germany; University of Zürich, Switzerland; Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland; University of Christchurch, New Zealand.

Research expertise: Anthropological and sociological theory; anthropology of development and environment; social movements and civil society; social justice and inequality; human rights and indigenous rights.

Current research activities: Development and environment in the Central Himalayas; the politics of dispossession and displacement in Jharkhand; ideas and realities of justice in India; the intercultural connectivity of human rights.

Human rights interculturally | Menschenrechte interkulturell

The human rights regime presents itself as a global normative order with a universalist claim and as positive law in the form of international jurisdiction. However, the global acceptance of human rights should not obscure the fact that their recognition is often only a matter of formal agreement, without consistent practical implementation in everyday political and social life. This is also because the human rights package is often seen as a primarily Western product, which tends to ignore cultural differences and alternative normative or value concepts and whose intercultural legitimacy is therefore not easily given. My project therefore raises the question of the connectivity or possibility of connecting other cultural traditions to the existing human rights regime and the potential for its conceptual expansion - for example through preceding processes of inter-categorical translation and value generalization. Human rights in their current form are not a once and for all fixed and unchangeable product, but are in principle open to new interpretations, reformulations and extensions that can result from intercultural dialog.

A first source for the identification of potentially compatible values and norms, as well as those that suggest a reformulation or expansion of the existing human rights regime, are - according to the thesis - regional human rights drafts from particular cultural contexts (e.g. African (Banjul Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, 1981; Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, 1981; Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, 1990; Bangkok Declaration, 1993). African (Banjul) Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, 1981; Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, 1981; Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, 1990; Bangkok Declaration, 1993). On the one hand, the regional drafts can be seen as attempts to translate the UN Declaration of Human Rights into specific cultural contexts in order to make it understandable and acceptable there. But they can also - and this seems to me to be of further significance - be read as references to guiding ideals from particular contexts which, translated into the language of law, lay claim to universal validity and thus also to inclusion in the global human rights regime. Value dimensions that should be given greater consideration from a regional perspective are, for example, economic and social justice, the strengthening/restoration of sociality and a consistent recognition of duties as the basis of the moral community.

My project pursues two research objectives. Firstly, it attempts to work out the basic lines of the value horizon and the possible spectrum of values relevant to human rights in selected civilizational-cultural contexts (e.g. South Asia, Africa); and secondly, to critically explore the conditions and possibilities of value generalization.

A systematic elaboration of the normative or value constellations seems to me to be the necessary basis for a discourse of "value generalization" (Hans Joas), in which the Western tradition would then also have to undergo a critical revision. The concept of cultural "translation" and especially that of "trans-categorical translation" can be made methodologically fruitful for such a dialogical-hermeneutic undertaking (cf. the work of Doris Bachmann-Medick). Translation - in the sense of a culturally sensitive, hermeneutically guided practice of analysis and communication - is able to advance to a level of reference at which the initial conditions and deep structures of intercultural communication and interaction can be critically examined. Only when the theories and concepts of one's own as well as the foreign system of thought are scrutinized, when their areas of validity, dimensions of interpretation, history and contexts are clarified, do key concepts of the different traditions become recognizable and "negotiable" and can serve as a basis for universalization and value generalization processes. Human rights thus also prove to be a problem of translation.

Monographs

• Forest Futures: Global Representations and Ground Realities in the Himalayas. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2007. American edition: London and New York: Seagull Books, 2008.
• Opake Gestalten des Denkens: Jürgen Habermas und die Rationalität fremder Lebensformen, München: Fink Verlag 1986.

Edited Volumes

• 2022 (ed. with Vidhu Verma). State, Law and Adivasis: Shifting Terrains of Exclusion. Delhi: Sage Spectrum.
• 2019 (ed. with Martin Fuchs, Martin Mulsow, Bernd-Christian Otto, Rahul Parson, and Jörg Rüpke), Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter
• 2021, B.R. Ambedkar’s Imaginations of Justice. In: Rathore, Aakash Singh (ed.) B.R. Ambedkar: The Quest for Justice. Vol. III Legal and Economic Justice, 87-103. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• 2020, Bhagavadgita, In Joisten, Karen, Jan Schapp, und Nicole Thiemer (Hrsg.), Die Rezeption der Geschichten-Philosophie Wilhelm Schapps. Kommentare und Fortsetzungen, 82-106. Freiburg und München: Verlag Karl Alber.
• 2020, The Power of Audibility: Contestation and Communication as Route to Cohesive Development, in: Sunil Ray, Neetu Choudhary, Rajeev K Kumar (eds.), Theorizing Cohesive Development: An Alternative Paradigm, 44-67. London: Routledge.
• 2019, The Empathic Subject and the Question of Dividuality, in: Martin Fuchs, Antje Linkenbach, Martin Mulsow, Bernd-Christian Otto, Rahul Parson, and Jörg Rüpke (eds.), Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter.
• 2019, (with Martin Mulsow) The Dividual Self: Introduction, in: Martin Fuchs, Antje Linkenbach, Martin Mulsow, Bernd-Christian Otto, Rahul Parson, and Jörg Rüpke (eds.), Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, 323-344. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• 2019, „Der Tod der der Muttersprache“ –Sprache und Sprachpolitik in Indien, in: Südasien 39.2, 7-12.
• 2018, Projecting a New Anthropology? Some reflections on Lawrence Krader’s contribution to the discipline of anthropology and his significance today, in: Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander (eds.), Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture. Lawrence Krader, Interdisciplinarity, and the Human Being, New York: Peter Lang (New York), 133-149.
• 2015, (with Martin Fuchs and Wolfgang Reinhard), Individualisierung durch Christliche Mission?, (Studien zur Außereuropäischen Christentumsgeschichte – Asien, Afrika, Lateinamerika), Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
• 2015, (with Christoph Bultmann), Religionen Übersetzen: Klischees und Vorurteile im Religionsdiskurs, Münster: Aschendorff.

Journal articles and book chapters

• 2021. B.R. Ambedkar’s Imaginations of Justice. In: Rathore, Aakash Singh (ed.) B.R. Ambedkar: The Quest for Justice. Vol. III Legal and Economic Justice, 87-103. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• 2020, Bhagavadgita, In Joisten, Karen, Jan Schapp, und Nicole Thiemer (Hrsg.), Die Rezeption der Geschichten-Philosophie Wilhelm Schapps. Kommentare und Fortsetzungen, 82-106. Freiburg und München: Verlag Karl Alber,
• 2020, The Power of Audibility: Contestation and Communication as Route to Cohesive Development, in: Sunil Ray, Neetu Choudhary, Rajeev K Kumar (eds.), Theorizing Cohesive Development: An Alternative Paradigm, 44-67. London: Routledge.
• 2019, The Empathic Subject and the Question of Dividuality, in: Martin Fuchs, Antje Linkenbach, Martin Mulsow, Bernd-Christian Otto, Rahul Parson, and Jörg Rüpke (eds.), Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, Berlin: De Gruyter.
• 2019, (with Martin Mulsow) The Dividual Self: Introduction, in: Martin Fuchs, Antje Linkenbach, Martin Mulsow, Bernd-Christian Otto, Rahul Parson, and Jörg Rüpke (eds.), Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, 323-344. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• 2019, „Der Tod der der Muttersprache“ –Sprache und Sprachpolitik in Indien, in: Südasien 39.2, 7-12.
• 2018, Projecting a New Anthropology? Some reflections on Lawrence Krader’s contribution to the discipline of anthropology and his significance today, in: Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander (eds.), Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture. Lawrence Krader, Interdisciplinarity, and the Human Being, New York: Peter Lang (New York), 133-149.
• Travelling Deities: Ritual, Territory and Authority in the Central Himalayas (India). The Hermeneutics of Ethnographic Research, in: Carlo Altini, Philippe Hoffmann, Jörg Rüpke (eds.), Issues of Interpretation. Texts, Images, Rites, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2018, pp. 253-268.
• (With Martin Fuchs) Critique of Conversion – Conversion as Critique: M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar and the Prerogative of Interpretation, in: Rafael Klöber and Manju Ludwig (eds.), HerStory. Historical Scholarship between South Asia and Europe. Festschrift in Honour of Gita Dharampal-Frick, Heidelberg: XAsia-eBooks, 2018, pp. 313-330.
• Environmental Justice in India? Examining the Compatibility between Sustainability, Social Justice and the Gandhian legacy, in: Journal of Social and Economic Studies (ANSISS), 2017, 27.1.
• Gender Dynamics and Equality in India: A Plea for an Integrative Approach to Social Justice, in: RDWU Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2017, Vol.2, pp. 5-21.
• Sustainable Development in a Dharmic Land? Environmental and Political Protest in Uttarakhand, in:  Joshi, B.K. and Joshi, Maheshwar P. (eds.), 2017, Unfolding Central Himalaya: The Cradle of Culture, Dehra Dun: Doon Library and Research Center; Almora: Almora Book Depot, 2017, pp. 296-324.

Collaborative project: "Die lokale Politisierung globaler Normen"

As part of her work as equal opportunities officer, Antje Linkenbach-Fuchs also takes on tasks in Max-Weber-Kolleg projects such as the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 294 "Structural Change of Property".

Closed Project

Kolleg-Forschergruppe "Religiöse Individualisierung in historischer Perspektive"

Symposium “Karma, Nirvāṇa and Social Equality” | 19.-21.07.2024

Conference Report | Abstracts