Our member Andrea-Vicky Amankwaa-Birago has collaborated with German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) on their educational videos on why anthropology matters.

This new series of short video clips—featuring contributions from scholars such as Karim Zafer (University of Trier), whose research spans youth, migration, transnationalism, Europe, and the Mediterranean—asks a central question for our time: Why is anthropology indispensable today?

Beginning from the discipline’s foundational inquiry into what it means to be human, the series demonstrates how anthropological practice renders the familiar strange and the unfamiliar newly legible. In a world marked by intensifying complexity and deepening social differentiation, anthropology offers analytical perspectives that resist simplistic narratives and instead foreground relational, context‑sensitive understandings of social realities.

The contributors highlight anthropology’s grounding in curiosity and critical reflection—qualities that make the discipline inherently transformative. Anthropological research reshapes established knowledge while also reshaping the researchers themselves. By taking alternative social and cultural orders seriously, questioning hierarchies of knowledge, and tracing how social transformations are imagined and enacted, anthropology expands the conceptual and practical horizons through which we understand and engage with the world.

The series also illustrates how specific fields—such as migration studies—reveal anthropology’s capacity to analyze global inequalities, border regimes, and everyday life in their political, economic, and moral dimensions. Debates around the decolonization of knowledge bring the discipline’s own epistemic practices into focus, showing how reflexive methodologies and equitable collaborations can generate new forms of research and teaching. Environmental anthropology, meanwhile, demonstrates how phenomena often framed as “natural”—species extinction, climate change—are deeply entangled with social structures, economic practices, political power, and cultural meaning.

At the heart of the discipline lies ethnographic fieldwork: long‑term, participatory engagement grounded in empathy and presence. Anthropologists work within social grey zones, ambiguities, and tensions—spaces where normative categories falter and other research methods fall short. It is precisely in these spaces that anthropology produces its most incisive insights.

The series originated at the DGSKA Conference 2025 in Cologne, where Sebastian Eschenbach and Britta von der Behrens interviewed colleagues about their work. Together, the clips present anthropology as a critical, adaptive, and transformative practice—one that reopens fundamental questions about humanity while offering concrete contributions to understanding and addressing the major challenges of our time.