Birgitt Röttger-Rössler
Wenn Wege sich trennen. Abschiedsfeiern aus sozialanthropologischer Sicht
Many societies celebrate farewells, whether the resulting absence is permanent (a job in another city) or temporary (a long journey). In my talk I shed light on an Indonesian farewell ritual from a sociological and anthropological perspective. My aim is to show how rituals generate emotions that draw communities closer while facilitating departure.
Birgitt Röttger-Rössler is a professor in the DFG-funded cluster Lan-guages of Emotion at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Before that she taught ethnology at the University of Cologne, served as a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnology, and directed the international research unit Emotions as Bio-Cultural Processes at the University of Bielefeld’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research. Her dissertation, completed in 1988 at the University of Cologne, explored social standing in the Makassar tribe of Sulawesi (Indonesia). Her recent publications are Die kulturelle Modellierung des Gefühls: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Methodik ethnologischer Emotionsforschung anhand indonesischer Fallstudien (2004); “Tell Me About Love“: Kultur und Natur der Liebe (co-edited, 2006); and Emotions as Bio-Cultural Processes: An Interdisciplinary Approach (co-edited, 2009).