MATTI BUNZL
Associate Professor
I specialize in the anthropology and modern history of Europe, with particular research interests in Jewish culture, gender and sexuality, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory. Additional interests include the history and theory of anthropology, historical ethnography, and the intersection of history, literature, and culture.
My book Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna was published in 2004 by the University of California Press. It is a comparative ethnography that explores the trajectory of Central European modernity and the European nation-state through a focus on its principal Others. In particular, I focus on the period since the 1970s, when both Jews and queers began to contest their violent exclusion from the public sphere. By the 1990s, this agenda received the support of a newly pluralizing state that sought to accommodate its body politic to the supra-national configuration of the European Union.
My current book-project returns to my interest in the history of anthropology. In a study centered on Franz Boas, I offer a reinterpretation of his work in the context of German and German-Jewish thought. This reading, in turn, serves as the basis for the development of a neo-Boasian anthropology.
In addition to my own work, I have co-edited books on the transition from state socialism to a market economy in Eastern Europe and the history of German anthropology. I am currently at work at two other co-edited volumes, a book on the state of postcolonial studies and a reader in the anthropology of Europe, part of a book series I co-edit at Indiana University Press.
Research Interests:
Anthropology of Jews and Judaism, gender and sexuality, modernity, nationness, ethnicity, history of anthropology, anthropological theory, historical ethnography, anthropology of literature, anthropology of mass media, Central Europe, North America
EDUCATION:
B.A. (with Distinction) and M.A Anthropology, Stanford University, 1993
Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1998
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Books:
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2007 | Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. |
| 2004 | Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press. |  |
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2003 | (co-editor with Glenn Penny) Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. |
| 2000 | (co-editor with Daphne Berdahl and Martha Lampland) Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. |  |
Essays & Articles:
| 2008 | "The Quest for Anthropological Relevance: Borgesian Maps and Epistemological Pitfalls." American Anthropologist 110(1): 53-60. |
| 2005 | "Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe." American Ethnologist 32(4): 499-508. |
| 2004 | "Boas, Foucault, and the 'Native Anthropologist': Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology." American Anthropologist 106(3): 435-442. |
| 2003 | "Of Holograms and Storage Areas: Modernity and Postmodernity at Vienna’s Jewish Museum." Cultural Anthropology 18(4): 435-468. |
| 2003 | "Austrian Zionism and the Jews of the New Europe." Jewish Social Studies 9(2): 154-173. |
| 2002 | "Foreword to Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other/ Syntheses of a Critical Anthropology." In Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. Reprint Edition New York: Columbia University Press: ix-xxxiv. |
| 1997 | "Outing as Performance/ Outing as Resistance: A Queer Reading of Austrian (Homo)Sexualities." Cultural Anthropology 12(1): 129-151. |
| 1996 | "Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture." In George Stocking, ed., Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition –History of Anthropology, vol. 8. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 17-78. |
COURSES TAUGHT:
| ANTH 190 | AMERICAN JEWISH CULTURE |
| ANTH 430 | THE HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ANTHROPOLOGY |
| ANTH 488 | MODERN EUROPE |