Dr. Karin Riedl

I joined the research project Dissecting Society in September 2021 as a post-doctoral researcher. My subproject focuses on Peru, especially the journalistic and literary movement costumbrismo peruano, an early form of nineteenth-century observation and description of society that aimed at representing and pedagogically correcting it. I am especially interested in the authors’ contribution to post-colonial nation-building, the conditions of knowledge production, and the influence the writings had on the emerging disciplines of cultural anthropology and sociology. An underlying question concerns the relations of economic, political, and representational power that pervade the journalistic as well as the later scientific texts and presumably connect them to each other. Questions of power were also central to my PhD project (finished in 2018, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich), which examined non-monogamous relationships, their relation to neoliberal discourse, and associated concepts of freedom and coercion. In my master’s thesis (2013, LMU), on the other hand, I pursued my interest in the history of science, analyzing the genesis of the term „shamanism“ since the eighteenth century and its appropriation in modern art. Throughout my studies, I also maintained a regional focus on the Andes region’s cultures and the language Quechua.