Prof. Dr. Tyler Zoanni

I am a tenure-track Juniorprofessor for Social/Cultural Anthropology [Ethnologie] at the University of Bremen. I grew up on a farm in Montana, and studied in Chicago, Cambridge (Mass), and New York, and I have worked in these places as well as Bayreuth and Halle before coming to Bremen. My research focuses on politics, health, religion, kinship, aesthetics, personhood, and subjectivity, grounded in fieldwork in East/Central and Indian Ocean Africa, but increasingly Central Europe too. I come to Contradiction Studies because I am fascinated by the ways that any collective endeavor—be it society, state, nation, institution, religion, science, etc.—demands a set of normative behaviors and ways of being and at the same time relies on a range of practices and experiences that bely and often even transgress or exclude what is demanded or even expected. Rather than view this contradictory condition—variously framed as one of rule and exception, norm and behavior, world and life—as some kind of problem, my own research explores such a contradiction is in fact constitutive of human beings and doings. My own research has examined this mainly in terms of disability, demography, and religion, but I am keen to mentor projects that explore this contribution to ›Contradiction Studies‹ in a broad sense.