4 June 2025

Photo: Braun/Boccaccio

The ecological crises of our time are not just worrying. Rather, there is something sinister about them. When dead fish suddenly float in rivers, when cows lose their minds in barns, when plastic appears in places where it doesn't belong, we are rightly uneasy. Is this nature's revenge? The true face of capitalism? Or is there something else behind it? As different as the ecological crises may be, they have one thing in common: what we first brought into our homes and farms from nature and then banished is returning—but in a different form. The coal we took from its resting place and put in our furnaces; the fertilizer we poured onto our fields; the uranium that lights up our living rooms: all these things seek an old or new home in their afterlife, causing all kinds of mischief in the process. So do we have to barricade our homes to prevent them from finding their way there? Should we refrain from digging in the earth from now on, lest we awaken evil spirits? If we don't want to fall into panic or shock, we have to do something completely different. To encounter ecology means to give all the revenants of what was once part of nature and society a new home where they can find peace.      

6:15 p.m. – 7:45 p.m., Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, West Wing, Room 221

Lecture series: Von Schönheit und Schrecken

Coordination
Prof. Dr. Ruzana Liburkina / Prof. Dr. Norbert Fischer, both from the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History, University of Hamburg