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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Andreas Lipowsky, M.A.

 Photo: Coming soon.

Curriculum

Andreas Lipowsky is a cultural historian and theorist whose research lies at the intersections of the history of anthropology, literary and cultural studies, and Indigenous studies. Following appointments at the Universität Konstanz and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, he received his PhD from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2024. His German-language dissertation, Metaanthropology: An Epistemic Poetics of Ethnography, develops an analytical framework for ethnography that brings the historical “crisis of representation” into dialogue with recent debates around anthropology’s ontological turn. This work was supported by a research appointment at the University of California, Berkeley (German Studies), and visiting graduate fellowships at the University of British Columbia (Literatures in English) and Cornell University (Anthropology).
 
During postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies in New Delhi, the German Historical Institute London, and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, Andreas Lipowsky examined nineteenth-century ethnographic fieldworkmethods in the British Empire. He is especially interested in how the ethnographic questionnaire Notes and Queries on Anthropology standardized the collection of colonial data and shaped the emergence of modern fieldwork.
 
Since 2022, he has co-convened the “Indigenous Epistemology” working group at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. He recently co-edited a Suhrkamp reader of German translations of key contributions to the ontological turn.

Publications (selection)

  • Metaanthropologie. Eine epistemische Poetik der Ethnografie. Berlin: De Gruyter 2027 (under consideration).
  • „Notes and Queries on the Andaman Islands: Edward Horace Man and the Paradoxes of the Questionnaire Method“. In: Early Ethnographers in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2026 (special issue of BEROSE – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie; forthcoming).
  • Co-edited with Bernardo Bianchi and Oliver Precht. Hrsg. Die ontologische Wende. Indigene Kosmologien und die Dekolonisierung des Seins. Ein Reader. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2026.
  • „›Anthropology is the Theory and Practice of Permanent Decolonization‹ – The Ontological Turn in Anthropology and Epistemic Delinking in the longue durée“. In: Kuckuck. Notizen zur Alltagskultur 25(1), 2025: pp. 46–50.
  • „Lebensphilosophie and the revolution in anthropology: Uncovering the original ›turn to life‹“. In: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(3), 2025: pp. 800–812.

Research project:  The Emancipations of Animism: From a “Minimal Definition of Religion” to Legal Personhood for the Whanganui River

In anthropology and religious studies, Edward Burnett Tylor codified animism in Primitive Culture (1871) as “a minimal definition of religion”—“the belief in Spiritual Beings.” By the late nineteenth century, the term had become shorthand for supposedly irrational and “primitive” ways of knowing and relating to the world.
 
Yet the breadth of Tylor’s definition made “animism” expansive enough to encompass practices across cultural, linguistic, legal, and epistemic domains. This project traces the concept’s afterlives, asking how contemporary Indigenous resurgences draw on, appropriate, transform, or refuse it. Although Tylor’s evolutionary scheme has long been discredited, Indigenous struggles over sovereignty and environmental justice remain entangled with academic and popular invocations of animism.
 
In Hamburg, I will examine Māori-led legal innovations in Aotearoa New Zealand commonly grouped under the rubric of rights of nature. Te Urewera (2014), Te Awa Tupua/Whanganui River (2017), and Te Kāhui Tupua/Taranaki Maunga (2025) were recognized as legal entities or persons, giving statutory form to Māori relationships of kinship and ancestry. Drawing on the intellectual histories surrounding the category of “animism,” the project examines how these legal innovations simultaneously unsettle colonial taxonomies, translate Indigenous ontologies into settler law, and transform established legal categories.