Prof. Andrea Lauser

Since 2007 Andrea Lauser is Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Göttingen. Having studied at the Universities of München and Freiburg she holds a Master and a Doctoral degree in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Freiburg as well as a habilitation in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Marburg. She has done extensive fieldwork on indigenous cosmologies in the Philippines, with a special focus on power, gender, and generation among the Mangyan of Mindoro, the Philippines, and on Filipino transnational marriage migration. From 2006 to 2007 she joined the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany) with a research project on religion and ritual spaces in the context of transnational mobility and conducted fieldwork in Northern Vietnam. From 2011 to 2015 she was the spokesperson for the research program on the Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia (http://www.dorisea.de/en).

Currently she is a member of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Religious Studies (FIRSt), of the Network for Global Migration Studies and of the Göttingen Platform for Global and Transregional Studies at Göttingen Campus.
She co-edited among others the recent volumes “Religion, Place and Modernity in Southeast and East Asia. Reflections on the Spatial Articulation of Religion” (2016), “Ghost-Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Narratives, Cultural Contexts, Audiences.” (2016), “Haunted Thresholds. Spirituality in Contemporary Southeast Asia. Geister in der Moderne Südostasiens” (2014), “Performing Identity: Politics and Culture in Northeast India and Beyond” (2013 Asian Ethnology 72,2), “Engaging the Spirit World. Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia” (2011), DORISEA Working Paper Series (http://www.dorisea.de/de/dorisea-working-papers).
Main focus in research and teaching:
Regional:
– Southeast Asia (with many years of fieldwork experience on the Philippines and in Vietnam)
Thematic:
– Religion, migration/mobility, identity politics, dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia, material religion and cultural heritage in Southeast Asia; anthropological methods; lived religion and aesthetics; urban anthropology (“material turn”, visions of the future)